Extending an Olive Branch
On public grief and joy
Hello and welcome to the 50th issue of Place! Most of us wouldn’t describe our interactions with strangers or members of our community as intimate. As public life has become even more inaccessible over the last 12-months, these gaps in our collective connections with each other seem at times, wider than ever. In this week’s letter, Place co-editor Kylee Pedersen reflects on the importance of outward expressions of joy an grief in communal places, and how cultivated public action – no matter how seemingly small – can make us feel a little bit less like strangers to one another.
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This past Palm Sunday, running out to get groceries before the shops closed early, I came across crowds of people holding olive branches in the main town square of Agropoli, Italy. The air was calm and lofty with sun, people’s voices and movements seemed oddly crisp as they do in spring. The silvered-green of the olive leaves flickered in the hands of every passer-by, while the low sound of espresso machines echoed out of the few open bars, and families gathered around public benches, kissing each other's cheeks through face masks.
The sight was surprising before I remembered what day it was, but even then I was struck by the uniformity of actions around me. Though I grew up in a culture where Christianity is ubiquitous, where the Palm Sundays of my youth were spent preoccupied in church weaving bracelets out of the free fronds, I couldn't remember a time that I’d been surrounded by such a communal partaking. It wasn’t an organised procession or event; everyone just seemed to know. This morning, of all mornings, was the one to carry around an olive branch.
Some held whole bunches of the leaves. Waiting in line to enter a shop, I watched two elderly women who stood in the centre of the promenade, handing out extra branches to children or teens who approached them empty handed. Others exchanged the small limbs as they met, like they were small tokens of affection, or a peace offering.
Such intimate acts of public life are not a common sight for the majority of us, whether in rural areas or large cities. Communal acts in these places exist, sure, but they look vastly different to the display I was witnessing. The coursing waves of a morning commute or weekend escapes to cherished city parks are acts we collectively participate in - but they are often not acts in which we purposely interact with each other. They also lack the quality of singularity. They are not something that we reserve for certain days or moments, to abandon our usual patterns and mutually choose to take part in something else.
The olive branches on Palm Sunday had an obvious religious undertone, but it wasn’t just that custom that brought Agropoli and its residents closer to me, even though I couldn’t speak the language and was in nearly every essence, a complete stranger.
Plastered on large bulletin boards on the town’s high street and at the gated entrance to its old town, which, high on a cliff, overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea, were layered posters of obituaries. Large black lettering with phrases like ‘Ciao Nonno Antonio’ and radiating depictions of the Madonna beside youthful printed portraits of those passed, graced each excursion I took outside my flat. Often, I would pass people standing in front of the boards, seemingly discussing those who had passed, placing a hand on their name.
What reciprocal public life most of us are confronted on a daily basis takes place on social media, which seems oddly curated, not to mention unnaturally grounded outside of shared physical space. Layer the pandemic on top of that, and the last 12 months have been particularly devoid of any in person collective interaction.
But here, on my walk to the grocery store, was a public display of grief, an unearthing of something commonly concealed, for the purpose of people’s interaction with it – ironically, on the day that marks the beginning of the celebration of eternal life in the Christian faith.
We need collective spaces for sadness and for joy, and we need them, I think, in person. There is a necessity in bringing what we experience in isolation in the rooms of our homes to public places, to cross the threshold from the inner to the outer life, and meet each other there. To be able to bind our emotions up in physical consecrations – in the leaves of olive trees, in the smooth surface of a piece of paper with a loved ones name on it – and show them to each other, in lieu of words that may never come.
Walking through the fragmented crowds on Palm Sunday, I felt my own hand more obviously empty than before. Heading back up the stairs to the old town on the cliff, the breeze slowed and the crowds thinned. I heard a sort of rustling and looked up to see an elderly man leaning over a low wall that lined the stairs with his head in the boughs of an olive tree. After a few moments I heard a muffled snap. He stepped back from the wall, holding a small olive branch, and walked past me down the stairs, towards the centre of town.
- Kylee Pedersen is a co-editor of Place and a writer based in London, UK. She writes about travel, food, and the natural world, among other things.
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Thank you for writing a vivid piece that we could mentally participate in during Palm Sunday !