Oranges at the door.

Reminder: You - yes you - are a radiant fucking miracle.

Today, when my husband and I returned from the store, someone had left a bag of oranges at our door. In season now, you see them hanging like bright Christmas ornaments fat on the trees. We don’t know which tree these came from, or who left it for us (though we have a good guess on that…). But there they were.

Just a few days before, I visited a friend at her eden-like garden, as the Bible says, full of every fruit. Her paradise is also home to a menagerie of delightful animals. Eight hens, two roosters, several donkeys and a sweet old dog. She sent me home with eggs the hens had laid, olive oil from this year’s harvest, and sweet, delicious oranges.

Gifts of the land, given from the heart. Simple, perfect, and most, most welcome.

What a counterbalance to the mundane barbarity of the world. Yet another shooting on a college campus, predators moving on prey, seeds of suffering proffering dank fruit. Anger becomes our go-to, a reflex. That, or we show up half way. Sad. Discouraged. Exhausted from life’s demands and disappointments.

Yet this is also a season of miracles. Lamp oil that should run out but doesn’t. A bright star points the way to a new kind of love being born. Extraordinary times, no doubt, but remote, too. Like Star Wars, they happened a long time ago, in a land far away. Now miracles are things we celebrate once a year and then put back on a shelf. Not quite believed, but festive enough. We forget that we, ourselves, dwell in the miraculous. Every day. This world, absofuckinglutely miraculous. The love we build lives around, miraculous. When tragedy hits, the way we show up with a casserole and bandaids, miraculous.

We are the ever-flowing lamp oil. We are love born to soothe the weary world.

To be alive – what a gift that is. Sunset hues streaking the sky. The silk of a child’s hair as they tuck in for a story. Any kind of chocolate. Kind words after a hard day. A bag of oranges at the door.

You are the miracle. You are a tree in full flower. So share the sweetness of your simple, delicious, abundant gifts. Give away your oranges. There will be more.

XO Jean

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Speaking of sacred things…

It’s morning in Bodhgaya, India. I’m circumambulating the Mahabodhi Temple and the ancient ficus religiosa tree, the sacred fig, at its heart. The tree is a graceful descendent of the one Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath, vowing not to get up again until he became enlightened, a Buddha, sometime between 528 and 445 BCE. People have been coming here ever since.

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Yeah, but what about the brain?

For a culture as particular about death as the ancient Egyptians, in her poem “Egyptian Afterlife,” poet Jacqueline Jules invites us to consider a surprising omission in their elaborate funeary rites: what becomes of the brain?

The poem answers this question, though it would be a spoiler to say how. You’ll just have to read it (or let Jacqueline read it to you).

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