Ching Ming is a Chinese festival in which families go out to care for the graves of their ancestors, and to offer them burnt gifts of paper replicas of money and material goods. The ancestors are cared for as the family celebrates, the living and the dead together.
What do you offer to those who have gone before you?
“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.”
―John O’Donohue
What is your soul in search of?
The loveliest paths to walk can be those that are neither in the full hot sun nor in the dark shade of dense cover, but rather in the shimmering sunlight that filters through many leaves. A flash of white hot insight can be amazing, but mostly we come to understand the world in in bits and snatches, filtered through our daily experiences of the world.
What path leads you to bits of daily insight?
It seems like kind of a cruel holiday—having a day designated to play tricks on people. But life is forever playing tricks on us, both cruel and kind, and it’s maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have a day to remind ourselves that our job is to keep our equilibrium and sense of humor in the face of life’s sudden turns.
What helps you stay balanced when life gets tricky?
The Easter bunny travels around bringing colored eggs for children to find—one of the more truly bizarre assertions of a holiday. But Easter is about the improbable, the strange, the unbelievable notion that not only does life spring from death, but that life is present even in the midst of death, that death may be inevitable and permanent, but still does not have dominion.
What improbable conviction do you hold dear?
