"Wabbits!"
(+ pillars & other paired-postings)
Warmest wishes for the day, month and season…
… in every way you might celebrate.
This brief postcard is to note what’s probably my favorite of the more soulful holidays.
It’s on the fly this year, with a quick weekend turnaround at home between back-to-back visits in Asheville. (Exploring OLLI, the life-long learning program at the university there is early in the week ahead.)
First, those title creatures are with a nod and some apology to Elmer Fudd (and, well, Bugs Bunny, “the hunted quarry,” too…)
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“wabbits🐇🐇”
A calendar quirk this year pairs two rabbit traditions on consecutive days, the Easter bunny this morning and the new month’s rabbit-rabbit first thing at dawn tomorrow.
The bunnies of Easter and the month of March both exit at midnight tonight. So for all who practice the good-luck ritual, it’s time to say rabbit-rabbit before speaking any other words aloud on the first of the month. (I have never been able to do it on waking from sleep — prime dream material going on, never with any rabbits! At stroke of midnight works better, and a nice ritual when the late bedtime isn’t an every-night habit.)
And yes, for those who don’t practice and maybe never heard of rabbit-rabbit, this could seem like an April Fool joke. It really is a thing; even FDR is said to have done it along with carrying a lucky rabbit’s foot.
You can Google it, honest.
The illustration at center — if not the best-ever Easter Bunny cartoon, it is surely the best-ever pairing of Bunny-&-Beatles! (This one’s thanks to Paul Karasik of The New Yorker.)
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On a more reflective note, below are some of lovely prolific Maria Popova’s “Brain Pickings” in her Marginalian online publication. (The entire essay is worth a read and has several good related links.)
Discussion of the title themes is excerpted more fully here, as for me these ideas seem timely for the pensive, reflective aspects of Easter season.
They speak to our need for a path through so many thorny current situations, both those writ large and the mundane.
There are additional echoes of Jung on the universal human shadow and transcending duality — and of Hillman regarding the essential potency of real conversation.
the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life
(quoted from Maria Popova)
A generation after James Baldwin observed in his superb essay on Shakespeare how “it is said that his time was easier than ours, but… no time can be easy if one is living through it,” Nick Cage [not the actor] prefaces his own advice with a calibration:
“The world… is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end — mystifying and forever in a state of flux.”
He then offers his two pillars of a fulfilling life — orientations of the soul that “have a softening effect on our sometimes inflexible and isolating value systems”:
The first is humility.
Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.
The other quality is curiosity.
If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world…”
Couple with Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on what makes a fulfilling life and revisit Nick Cave’s humble wisdom on the importance of trusting yourself, the art of growing older, and the antidote to our existential helplessness, then savor his lush On Being conversation with Krista Tippett about loss, yearning, transcendence, and “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering”…
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Before closing today I’ll leave you with one more pairing: Of two kitties.. also of grownups + children of all ages, learning together to navigate challenge and change.
a sneak peek
Here’s the cover of a special brand-new book. You’ll soon be hearing lots more about it, and its gifted author and illustrator, in newShrink.
And, that is all I have. Talk to you soon!
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”