Like many of you, it is with gratitude and some relief to find out that all the packages are wrapped and the stockings are hung by the chimney with care. I have spent recent weeks poring over food magazines and exploring the palate of various holiday cultural traditions, imagining that this year I will do something completely different. This desire to do something surprising is a bracing tonic against the fierce wind blowing otherwise so forcefully in the direction of traditional and familiar. Holidays come with so many expectations that inevitably, they all cannot be met. Still, there is something to be said for hanging on to the tried and true rites of the holiday season. Among the most precious, is the time to step away from ordinary pursuits and recapture and savor for a brief moment, the sheer joy of being. This spiritual oasis is immortalized in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, as “Simple Gifts”, a one verse song written by a Shaker in 1848, with lyrics that call forth this sacred space:
 Tindall Pioneer Homestead, Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse & Museum |
Fast forward 150 years and the gift to be simple is much harder to achieve. The Shakers sought unsuccessfully to establish a religious community that created separation from this other worldliness. Today, modern society has vastly escalated the erosion of simplicity by making complexity accessible on a global scale. Is it any wonder we get lost in the thicket between elaborate and simplicity, given such a contradiction?
Well, this is an old saw, I know; and doubtless, while life does seem to have been truly simple long ago, at least from a 21st century perspective, it really wasn’t, even for the Shakers who sacrificed much to find and organize themselves around an economy of life as its own spiritual reward. Today, we can admire the physical space this approach created and the beautiful form that functionality achieved in the care and craft of their capable hands. But the Shakers are themselves long gone, which speaks to the challenges of sustaining quiet, surrounded by the continuously growing decibel of modernity.
That is why, perhaps now, more than ever before, keeping things simple becomes more and more of a challenge in our daily lives, and especially now, at this time of year, when the focus is on “Gift” with a capital “G”, rather than on simplicity itself as perhaps the more prudent path. If you are like me, you will be playing at both ends of the field and hope to end up at the satisfying moment when you feel in your heart you have managed to do well in finding the quiet space in the holidays between simplicity and the elaborately generous. You know the moment because it settles like a gentle snow over our familial landscape as the gift of giving. This experience of giving is thus transformed when it occurs on a plane of simplicity. Many years later, perhaps inspired by the changing context of the times, new verses were added to the original Shaker lyrics to “Simple Gifts”:
At this time, in this place, with our friends and loved ones both near and far, and with the precious memory of those known only to our hearts, the simple gifts are the ones we most long to give and receive. The Shakers were on to something. Happy Holidays to you all!
