How Can We Keep from Singing celebrates singing and the creative spirit. How Can We Keep from Singing celebrates singing and the creative spirit.

How Can We Keep From Singing by Joan Oliver Goldsmith

HOW CAN WE KEEP FROM SINGING:
Music and the
Passionate Life

    by Joan Oliver
   Goldsmith
    Pub. by W.W. Norton
    also available through
    Penguin Canada
    Publicity: Aimee Bianca
    (212) 790-4388
    abianca@wwnorton.com

"Small Blessings This Year"
by Joan Oliver Goldsmith

Every year in December, I write an essay or poem or fairy tale to send to friends and colleagues. This year I sat down, pen in hand and tried, really tried. But this year I just don’t want to write a holiday piece. I want Sept. 11 never to have happened. I want Israelis and Palestinians to stop killing each other. I want my new husband and his kids to feel like my family and my new neighborhood to feel like home. But I stand helpless before world events, and surprisingly often, personal ones, too. It takes two years to make a new family, they say. I have come to accept feeling like a stranger in a strange land. I count that as an achievement.

At least colored lights flash, cheerful and friendly, here and there throughout the neighborhood. I see them, not so much as a statement of religious belief - including some, excluding others - but as a way to nourish a deep, ancient hunger. We all walk in darkness this time of year, and have done so since long before Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism. We have always longed to see a great light.

I don’t see a great light, just small ones: tiny blessings that cross my path and are gone in an instant - like the silly way a squirrel bounces across my lawn, taking advantage of this peculiar mid-winter warmth to search for one more nut, one more bit of security.

I trust the small blessings. In middle age, I have come to believe that large blessings come with a large price tag. Loving people, giving your all to create a work of art - these are great privileges and they have brought me much joy. They have also taught me a loneliness and fear I haven’t known since childhood nightmares.

But the small blessings are free. The precision flying of geese, late on their annual trip south. And the pleasure of walking my younger step daughter to the bus in the morning. I’m honored to be asked, and it gives me time to enjoy the crescent moon hanging white and low in the morning blue black sky.

And her older sister digging up a much read copy of Harry Potter so I could check a line that I remembered resonating more clearly in the book than the film. - . . . to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.-

I have been loved like that. I miss her, especially during the holidays.

So this year I ask for open eyes and an open heart with which to receive the small blessings. They are here and gone so quickly. One must be paying attention. But they are real. As real as love. As real as war.