April is the saddest month - how poetry offers support in hard times.

Using poetry as a tool to connect and reflect on life's complexities. With Jennifer Michael Hecht on her new book, The Wonder Paradox.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

―T.S. Eliot,The Waste Land

This is my second interview with Jennifer Michael Hecht, historian, and poet, author of Doubt, Stay, The Happiness Myth, and most recently, The Wonder Paradox. I am a person that somehow for some reason really wants to create a meaningful life but is befuddled by the contrary nature of existence. From talking to Kate Bowler, a Christian professor at Duke, Simran Jeet Singh on Sikh Wisdom in modern times, Kieran Setiya on using philosophy to cope, and now with Jennifer Michael Hecht, who has been called by some, a “priest of un-belief,” my intention is to create a framework of understanding from deep thinkers.

I just realized that I was creating an opening that I thought would appeal to a wide range of religious views. Noting that I don’t want to push away supernatural views that work for you. That offers comfort and solace, you getting you through your day. I think this book has a unique contribution for all faiths in its history of rituals, a methodology for examining traditions that work and don’t work for you, and yes, it offers an alternative to religious texts: poetry.

In the interview, we talk about how morality can exist without a God (have you wondered that?), the desire to feel needed, how to integrate poetry into your traditions, and ultimately where the meaning of life rests.

I hope that if you are a person of faith or a person who is “interfaithless” (a term akin to “Atheist” without the negative connotations it sometimes comes with), you find some understanding and comfort in our collective human need to grapple with life and somehow find the logic to keep going. To reach out to each other in the darkness.

There are several beautiful, poetic moments in the interview, Jennifer is a poet after all. There is hope and despair, an undertone of understanding and sadness, of multiple truths of co-existence. She structures each section with a tool kit that is inclusive of religion, art, and science, the times that we live in require us to use all humanity’s devices collectively. For example on memorials, she comes to the poem:

Love Sonnet LXXXIX – Pablo Neruda

When I die, I wish your hands upon my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass once more their cool touch over me:
to sense the softness that changed my fate.

I want you to live while I, asleep, await you.
I want your ears to go on hearing the wind.
I want you to smell the sea’s aroma we loved so together,
and to go on walking the sands we walked.

I want what I love to go on living.
And you, whom I loved and sung above all else,
for all that, flourish again, my flower,

to reach for everything my love demands of you,
so that my shadow is passed through your hair,
so that all can know the reason for my song.

(Translation: Terence Clarke)

With the question, of how to be good, there is of course no easy answer. Or answer in general. I often am tricked into doing nothing because I cannot find what the best decision would be. I believe we all are hoping to do the best we can in whatever framework that we are predisposed to or have encountered. Jennifer ends the book with:

May I offer grace to the beings around me, for we are all trying to get by, the best we know how to.

Love, Carissa.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

―Carl Sagan