say what you mean, mean what you say
Weekly newsletter 12.15.2021
Updates
Earlier in the pandemic, I reflected on a NYTimes article highlighting “divinity consultants,” not realizing it would be just the start of a series of articles, op-eds, interviews, and social media posts that reveal people’s deep reverence for their ritual lives...and the limits on their vocabulary for making meaning. On Friday’s episode of Here and Now (starting at 26:38), Tonya Mosley interviewed Evan Imber-Black, who recently published the article “Rituals in the Time of Covid19: Imagination, Responsiveness, and the Human Spirit,” and Hannah Kim, chair of anthropology at Adelphi University, about how people are retaining, rethinking, and reimagining their traditions and customs (or not) during the pandemic - expanding the moment that ritual geeks are having in the sun. Apparently, all it took was a global pandemic and a national reckoning with systemic racism and injustice for us to be useful. Honestly, it’s nice to feel useful and to be able to offer resources that have shaped my own worldview, including the work of ritual theorists, perspectives to enhance understanding of ritualized moments, and starting points for evaluating, rethinking, and reconstructing traditions, and much of what they chat about on Here and Now resonates with my own observations, many of which I tried to capture in “Home for the holidays.”
That got me thinking: I need to be a more effective self-promoter. The pandemic is a universal experience that has upended the practices that connect us to our core values and identities, but in smaller ways, in more discrete corners, folks have been rethinking their rituals for a while. I’ve been lucky to have people in my life who needed new rituals for a variety of reasons - because their cultural or religious tradition didn’t have a ceremony for them, or because they didn’t want the ceremonies their grew up with, or because they sought to weave elements from different backgrounds, or because they just wanted something new. I’ve learned so much from couples who asked me to design and officiate their weddings, and I was able to apply both those insights and the method I’ve developed along the way to my own wedding, some of which is reflected in “Say what you mean, and mean what you say,” a reflection on rooting a ceremony’s design in the vows (if you’re interested in how the rest of the ceremony took shape...I’m working on it…stay tuned...).
So, here’s my feeble attempt at self-promotion: if you know anyone who is getting married in 2021 or beyond and who doesn’t have a traditional ceremony they want to draw on, I’d love to help - whether it’s drafting vows, identifying other resources, adapting traditions appropriately, designing the whole ceremony, or officiating. It’s not just about weddings, of course - you might know a group or an organization rethinking their traditions, looking at them through the lens of 2020. Perhaps they’re trying to adapt to virtual platforms and finding them unsatisfying or clunky. Perhaps they’re evaluating them with social justice in mind and seeking to shed irrelevant or harmful vestiges. I’d love to help! Please consider sending them links to my essays on Medium or to my website.
I post longer reflections on Medium - not regularly, but as they’re ready. If you’re interested in exploring my take on the world, visit https://billhulseman.medium.com/. If anything strikes a chord (or a nerve!), leave a comment on Medium, or reach out to me directly to get a dialogue going!
Guided meditations via Zoom continue! Mondays at 4:00pm PST. The aim is to practice being present - to ourselves, to others, and to the world. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays, visit the meditation page on my site to sign up.
Good Stuff
Listen
When asked that terrible question, “If you could travel back in history…?” I don’t know why, but I’ve never thought to answer with “NYC in the late 1950s and early 60s.” I’d love to explore the jazz clubs of the Village, the haunts where artists and thinkers and writers and, well, others I guess, connected with each other and made an imprint on postwar American culture. Most of all, I’d want to find myself in a smoke-filled club (I can Febreze my clothes upon return to the 21st century) listening to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross perfect vocalese and move the needle in jazz, in vocal performance, and in the sound of “American music.” Besides being musical innovators, a racially integrated trio (Jon Hendricks was Black, Annie Ross and Dave Lambert were White) must’ve projected a powerful image. “Twisted” is one of their tightest - and funniest - records, but listening to it again now, in the coda of 2020, it feels relevant in a whole new way.
If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist
Read
Ready for some good news amid the last few years of political, economic, and cultural maelstrom? Joy Harjo, the US’ first Indigenous Poet Laureate, recently committed to her third term in that role. She’s been working on a project that prompted an interview from Business Insider. Now, I don’t think of BI as much more than clickbait with pithy news bites, but in their recently published interview with Harjo, the poet reflects on why people are turning to poetry today. “A poem,” she said, “can hold things that ordinary language cannot. And that’s one reason I wound up in poetry because four lines, 10 lines, even an epic poem can carry history, can carry a moment of social unrest and perhaps point in a certain direction or shift the meaning in a way with metaphor and language in a way that political rhetoric cannot.” Her signature project for the Library of Congress is “Living Nations, Living Word: A Map of First Peoples Poetry,” which aims to confront and transform the reality that indigenous people are invisible. “You will not find us fairly represented, if at all,” as she writes in the introduction, “in the cultural storytelling of American, and nearly nonexistent in the American book of poetry.” I was especially reminded of the Harjo poem I know best, one I’d reflected on several months ago (and which I used in this week’s guided meditation), when she wrote, “Place is central to identity, to the imagery and shape of poems, no matter what country, culture or geographical place.”.
“Perhaps the World Ends Here”
Joy HarjoThe world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table, we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
