Letter from the Acting President September 2022
“Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is
giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has
been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your
bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.”
Dear Reader,
My father’s parents, Richard and Phyllis Nelson, were the quintessential grandparents. Grandmom’s kitchen
specialty was strawberry rhubarb pie, and Granddad’s was steaks over the grill. She was a master at bridge,
and he was an expert fly-fisherman. She loved to make her grandkids vanilla malts, and he liked to teach
them to change their own oil to avoid overspending at the mechanic. Every time I climbed into the car after
a trip visiting them, Grandmom would slip me a bill, shooting me a sly look and whispering in hushed tones
“just some gas money.” As a child, I would devise ways to sneakily steal Granddad’s chapstick, so there was
a constant cat and mouse game between me, the chapstick bandit, and him, the chapstick sheriff. About a
year ago, after more than seven decades of marriage, Grandmom passed away just a few months after
Grandad did.
One my biggest takeaways from this experience - my first significant loss of family - was its dual nature. I
was aware of a powerful, simultaneous experience of both joy and sorrow. On the one hand, their deaths
caused the family to come together and celebrate their lives, laughing our way through the memories that
weave the story of our family. On the other hand, as is stated at the beginning of many of ISH’s
bereavement groups, “grief Is the price of love,” and their departure brought mourning, sadness, and the
melancholy advent of a new chapter for the family.
This dance between joy and sorrow is an example of a kind of “sacred dyad” – wedded opposites that are
found throughout religious traditions and that make up core aspects of spiritual life. It strikes me that the
very relationship between Grandmother and Grandfather, a familial embodiment of feminine and masculine
wisdom, involves yet another sacred dyad.
Indeed, these sacred dyads seem to be everywhere once you start paying attention to them.
Lex Gillan, ISH’s resident yoga expert and beloved teacher to many thousands of students, once named
another dyad. Instructing a hall full of eager meditators, Lex guided us to sit and become as still as possible.
So, there we sat softening into stillness – our minds anchored on slowing and deepening breath, our bodies
resisting the urge to shift in our seats or to scratch an inconvenient itch. Of course, as we practiced stillness,
we quickly became aware of the most subtle movements of body and mind. Blood pumping, chest rising
and falling, the monkey mind wandering all over the place… This, Lex softly noted, is “movement in
stillness.”
Another example - among my spiritual heroes is The Very Reverend Dr. Pittman McGehee, who I once heard
expound upon his definition of spiritualty. Spirituality, he said, is the “deep human longing to transfer the
transcendent into the imminent through experience and reflection.” McGehee’s definition plays with the
notion that we live in a kind of in-between space, and that meaning comes from taking both sides of the in-
between seriously, experiencing them in relationship rather than as mutually exclusive. This resembles
popular definitions that invoke the relationship between the sacred and profane.
Navigating these sacred dyads, Dr. Jeff Kripal once taught me, is the wonderous opportunity to experience
“creative tension,” which us humans can use to make sense of concepts which otherwise seem at odds with
each other. Joy and sorrow, sacred and profane, movement and stillness, transcendent and imminent,
simple and complex… Like the strings on a guitar, the song of life has no sound but for the creative tension
between seeming opposites.
In fact, our work at ISH would not be possible without the ability to explore sacred dyads such as life and
death, sickness and health, good and evil…
What dyads do you experience, and how do you hold them in creative tension to make life sing?
With Peace and Warmth,
Stuart C. Nelson, MA
Acting President
Executive Vice President