Hey there, friends! Welcome back to the Palace in Time. This month, I’m sharing a few excerpts from my books that seem to echo the traditional themes of Advent. You can read the excerpts here or listen to the podcast episode in which I stumble through explanations and then finally get around to reading the thing. This is Sarah’s Podcast: The Unedited. You’re welcome.
The theme of the third week of Advent is traditionally joy. Joy isn’t strictly happiness; it’s an emotion with more fullness than just reaction to our circumstances. It is born from gratitude, and gratitude is born from grace—the receipt of a gift unearned.
To put it in some simple and old language, Grace begets Gratitude, and Gratitude begets Joy.
I chose this short essay, “From Above and Below,” because it captures two moments in my life where I experienced this sequence deeply and sharply, both under a Perseid meteor shower (which I may or may not have pronounced correctly in the recording).
This essay is in American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. If you haven’t read American Honey, it is about the first 10 years of my marriage with Brandon, who, spoiler alert, is still my husband. The chapter that precedes “From Above and Below” is called “Not-My-Husband,” and it deals with a season of temptation, a complicated relationship with a colleague, and complicated emotions that flow from it. Here is the excerpt:
From Above and Below
Dad and I sat on the tailgate of his truck and waited. My skinny shins swung back and forth rhythmically and unconsciously, a child not yet woman, always in motion. The night air was warm enough to be out without a coat. The maple on the hill cast a dim shadow from the light of the moon.
“Oh! There's one! Did you see it?” I asked, pointing to the sky. The meteor shower was supposed to be clearest in the darkest of night. It was still early, by that standard, but already the falling stars had begun to dash across the sky. Each one sent a jolt to my heart. “Wow,” I said. “So beautiful.”
The tip of Dad’s cigarette glowed orange in the night. He took a draw and then exhaled the smoke off to the side away from me. Summer’s night sounds surrounded us, a silence that was everything but silent, a silence whirring with the hum of insects, the rustle of summer leaves, our breathing in and out.
In the middle of the silence, we watched the sky and waited for more flickering, fleeting glimpses of a space beyond our world.
*
Brandon and I sneak out the patio doors of our bedroom and sit in the tall wooden beach chairs to watch the ocean and the sky as a meteor shower begins. There isn’t much to see from the second-floor deck except the sky and the shoreline spotted with outdoor lights, a hint of the horizon line in the distance. The ocean pushes rhythmically against the sand, looming mysterious below. From where we sit and with the limited amount of light, we can’t see the beach clearly, but we can hear it, a constant swelling and crashing reminder of its presence.
This body of water that already seems endless and huge in daylight only grows in its mystery after the sun has set. In the darkness of night, what rages onshore is unknown. The waves could be monstrous or simply lapping the sand, it’s hard to tell. The sand itself seems to move and sink and rise overnight as the ocean works its shifting. In the morning, we would walk along the shoreline and find the castles and moats that were created yesterday swept away, no evidence left except maybe a small whirlpool, some discarded shells. The ocean daily restores the beach, undoing what has been done.
I don’t care to walk along the shoreline at night. I want only to sit near the roar of the ocean, the warm salt breeze gusting, and revel in this power and this glory, both above us and below, to hear the work of redemption on the shore. We sigh and watch the sky.
From far above the push and pull, the tension I had carried in my shoulders for what felt like forever loosens. I am free, free, free at last. I only stopped because you told me to, he had said in his final text, and I checked delete. Done. Gone. Away. It was as if it had been a year of low tide, the beach pummeled by wind, pockmarked by strangers building castles in the sand, setting up camp with their beach umbrellas and chairs, pounding the packed and broken shells with their tennis shoes in the morning and excavating the beach for what lay hidden underneath at night, all with no relief, no high tide to wash away the wreckage of the day. Until now.
The meteor shower was just beginning, brief and sudden flashes of shooting stars across the broad sky. “Look!” I point and shout, expecting the latest gleam to flicker out to nothing quick, but “Oh!” it keeps going, a long tail of fire streaking against the black, burning through the atmosphere, as if it might never fizzle out, as if it might stretch and burn and fall, on fire, until it falls with a great splash into the ocean. I grab my husband’s arm and grin.
With every crash against the shoreline, a surge of gratitude moves within my chest, washing away what had been done, a few divots in the surface, some minor pools in craters.
Here I am. I am here.
I sit with him on the beach chairs high above all of those unknowns holding his hand, staring out over the dunes and up into the night sky. The beach will be flat again tomorrow, the waters edged in—this far, and no more.
I am grateful for the roar.
I hope that you are able to experience small and large moments of grace, of gifts given during this season, that you were not expecting. Moments of blessing that come out of nowhere, that inspire gratitude, and may that gratitude give you many reasons to feel joy this season.
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