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Rabbi Dan Ornstein: May Day

O stormy, stormy world,

The days you were not swirled

Around with mist and cloud

Or wrapped as in a shroud,

And the sun’s brilliant ball

Was not in part or all

Obscured from mortal view—

Were days so very few

I can but wonder whence

I get the lasting sense

Of so much warmth and light.

If my mistrust is right

It may be altogether

From one day’s perfect weather,

When starting clear at dawn

The day swept clearly on

To finish clear at eve.

I verily believe

My fair impression may

Be all from that one day

No shadow crossed but ours

As through its blazing flowers

We went from house to wood

For change of solitude.

Robert Frost gave his poem the somewhat awkward but significant title, “Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length.”  Frost’s battles with life-long depression, along with the tragic losses he experienced, likely cemented his dark observation that whatever sense of happiness he possessed might all be boiled down to one day of perfect weather that he once enjoyed with a friend or lover.

I am very lucky not to have lived with the depression that gripped Frost so tightly, though I have supported loved ones and friends who regularly feel its fingers on their necks, and I am personally familiar with anxiety, depression’s partner in crime.  All of us have lived or will live through periods so filled with sadness that anything remotely joyful feels as surprising to us as it did to the poet.  For the past several months since my father in law’s death in November, the world has felt at times like one endless snowstorm to my family, swirled with emotional mist and cloud, literally and figuratively wrapped in a burial shroud. 

Yet throughout these months of our mourning, small, redemptive moments of joy have peeked their heads through and punctuated the winter days of our discontent, reminding us that grief also passes, howbeit with the slowness of melting ice on the coldest days of early spring.  For instance, we were blessed that our children were fully present, physically and emotionally, through the first parts of the traditional Jewish period of mourning observed by my wife.  They honored their grandfather’s memory and our family’s life with an infectious youthfulness that made us hopeful, and that would have made him proud. 

Too soon and all too naturally, they headed back to school, work and the preoccupations of adolescence and young adulthood, moving on, but also checking in as needed.  Gradually, winter faded into spring, the sunlight hours of each day lengthened, and we arrived, like survivors on an ocean raft, at the shores of the current month, filled with warmth and light.  One night at the very beginning of the month, as I was returning home from comforting another family in mourning, I was reminded that our own winter of sadness was slowly shrinking down from a long sentence without a period to a punctuation mark.  As I drove away from the grieving family’s home down a quiet street, with my car windows open, I Iistened to my first cricket chorus of the season. As I came to a stop sign, I watched a bat suspended in mid-flight, its wings speeding like those of an anxious hummingbird.  Suddenly, it rocketed up in the air toward the sliver of moon hanging gracefully in the evening sky. 

Life was returning all around me, a gentle protest to Robert Frost that, in fact, there is far more to hope for than one elusively perfect day in which all happiness is concentrated.  I came home that night singing.  My wife looked up from her quiet reading on the couch and asked, “Why are you so happy?”  Without needing to give a detailed explanation, I responded, “Honey, it’s the first of May.”

Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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