May Day Urgency and Ecstasy
It's May 1st, and I am split open.
Part of me wants to shout Mayday — the distress signal, the SOS — at the sheer urgency and grief at the man-made destruction happening on our planet. The other part wants to fall to my knees in prayerful ecstasy at the glory of spring beauty bursting out in every direction. Well, which is it? But both are real; neither impulse will yield to the other.
Like many of you reading this, I am living a peaceful life. I can hear a concert of goldfinches outside, not bombs overhead. Yes, our rivers and aquifers here in Colorado are frighteningly low, but I still have the privilege of running water, deciding what to eat for dinner, having the internet to connect me to my friends—and to the news of war.
Today, a perfectly beautiful day, it would be so easy to turn away. Yet I cannot shake the images of families torn apart in Isfahan and Tabriz, the wailing at funerals in Sidon and Tyre. The attacks on civilian life, on art and architecture and the bodies of the innocent, feel to me like a war against the Shechinah, the divine Feminine herself. And yet here she is, leaving love notes in the lilac-thick air, in the audacious unfurling of every new leaf. Her presence doesn't cancel the grief. The grief doesn't cancel her presence.
Jung would tell us we must hold the tension of opposites — the discipline of sitting with two contradictory truths without collapsing into one or the other, without premature resolution. It's uncomfortable in a way that feels unbearable. It's also, Jung believed, the only way something genuinely new can emerge. He called what emerges the transcendent function — not a compromise, not a split-the-difference, but a third thing that neither side could have generated alone.
I think this is the spiritual work of this particular May Day.
And lest we forget, May Day has always been a day of the people — of solidarity, of showing up for one another in the streets. This year May Day Strong, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations, is calling us into the streets: to march, gather, withhold our labor and our dollars for one day as a show of collective power: to end ICE raids. Tax the wealthy. Keep schools and hospitals out of the hands of profit. Defend our frayed democracy.
This, I think, is also the transcendent function — when grief and beauty stop being private and become collective action. I hope you will join me today — in the streets, and in the unbearable, necessary act of holding it all.
