Reflections by Rabbi Karen Martin
“When Life Seems a To-Do List” by Marjorie Saiser in How to Love the World, edited by James Crews
When the squares of the week fill
with musts and shoulds,
when I swim in the heaviness of it,
the headlines, the fear and hate,
then with luck,
something like a slice of moon
will arrive clean as a bone
and beside it on that dark slate
a star will lodge near the cusp
and with luck I will have you
to see it with, the two of us,
fools stepping out the backdoor
in our pajamas.
Is that Venus?–I think so–Let’s
call it Venus, cuddling up to the moon
and there are stars further away
sending out rays that will not
reach us in our lifetimes
but we are choosing,
before the chaos
starts up again,
to stand in this particular light.
Much like a flower, I am solar-powered and not made to withstand the cold. In nicer weather, I can stay outside for hours, but in this season, being outdoors is something to be endured, head down, shoulders hunched against the wind.
January is a hard month. The joy of Hanukkah has passed, and although we have moved beyond the darkest nights of the year, we must still slog through long stretches of dreary gray cold before we get to feel the heat of the sun. With the holidays behind us, we scramble to catch up on missed work, plan for what’s to come, and tend to all that must be done week in and week out.
In the winter, it’s easy to give in to the temptation to curl into ourselves, protecting our warmth from the cutting cold. It is easier to stay indoors, weighed down by the pressure of what must get done, or what we should be doing. For me, that includes laundry and dishes, teaching and learning, the minutiae of parenting, and doing what I can to stand up for what I believe in. These things are necessary and urgent, demanding attention, but they are not everything.
This poem, “When Life Seems a To-Do List,” feels like a gentle reminder of the other things—the small moments that fill me up and carry me through this season and every other. In the poem, the speaker looks up at the early morning sky, perhaps on a morning like this one as Rosh Hodesh Tevet approaches, the moon only a sliver on the horizon, with Venus resting at the cusp of the moon’s crescent. There is something both stark and warm in the language, in the image of the moon as a slice of white bone—as though it cuts through the noise and leaves the speaker picked clean. Yet it is not a painful cleansing; it is more like a mikvah, where one emerges pure from living water and takes the first breath after immersion, or like the way the world is blanketed and pristine after a heavy snowfall.
The warmth comes with these words, “and with luck I will have you / to see it with.” The speaker hopes to share this simple, poignant moment. There’s a gentle, self-deprecating humor in the imagined interaction, both in their pajamas as they guess at the star or planet, no cell phones intruding to give them the answer. It’s a moment of imagined connection; a pause made better because it is shared.
I am struck by the image the speaker paints of choosing. They choose to look up, to see the sky in the early hours, to bask not in the light of the sun, but in the quiet glow of the moon and stars. I find myself wondering what it would feel like to choose that particular light, to breathe into an intimate darkness and find companionship there before the chaos that comes with daylight.
The poem calls me to look up and around when I want to huddle into myself. It’s a reminder of the simple wonder found in connection and stillness, and that they are not mutually exclusive, but rather they are richer for being shared. As we enter the cold slog of January, may we be blessed with wonder, rejuvenating pauses, and connection.