Finding Your Joy
We are barely allowed joy in this world in these dark times but we are allowed. When you get to your joy don’t feel bad about keeping it as long as you are able. Don’t apologize. You probably didn’t even invite joy. It’s not like a butterfly in a jar. Joy will escape from you no matter how you try and contain it so don’t feel guilty when it arrives. We are barely allowed joy but when you have it you can share it and that helps it remain a few glimmers and sparkles longer. There’s no definitive instruction manual or step-by-step to help you find it or keep it or string it along just a few more minutes. But when you have it, take a minute, drop everything. Drop everything for joy.
“ Drop everything for joy. ”
One day, you’ll get an amount of joy equivalent to filling up an empty little plum jam jar, or maybe it was cherry, but don’t worry, someone will take it away on purpose or by sheer accident, or you’ll drop it and it will shatter. Holding it tighter or putting it further back on the shelf won’t help. Things happen. And people don’t really mean to steal your joy, they almost certainly don’t. They could use a little, too. It’s good to wish them some. Just a jam jar sized bit of joy, it won’t hurt you.
Anna Kamienska’s poem “Don’t Worry” from her book Astonishments goes like this:
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time
you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
until you learn at the very end to love life
Don’t worry if you feel a little joy in a dark and decrepit and terrifying time. Don’t worry about feeling joy, it’s not likely to stay too long, it won’t cling to you endlessly. Don’t worry because joy invented the word fleeting.
“Don’t worry if you feel a little joy in a dark and decrepit and terrifying time. ”
W.S. di Piero talks about having coffee in a cafe in San Francisco which suddenly transports him to Bologna twenty years prior. He begins his reminiscence, “The things of the world, their chancy stirrings, all in motion, as the Soul is in motion in the world.” He goes on to talk about joy: “What is this joy, so irrational and plain it makes me want to weep, to be here with these words of book and voice with the taste of the cities and the sound of the bells?” Whatever it is, he says, “the whole of it is what is merely given.”
Don’t worry if your irrational joy makes you want to weep. Whenever it arrives, it is what is merely given. It’s that splendid, that special, and filled with light. Don’t worry if your joy makes littles sense; it wasn’t made to have limitations.
Maybe your joy arrives and it is a wedge of lemon and if you squeeze it into a glass of water you can make it go further. It’s tart and fresh, and refreshing, too. Don’t feel bad with your joy, just sip it slowly.
Joy is a wedge of lemon but joy is also a terrific dancer. Joy can dance with sorrow and joy can dance with your disappointments and fear and depression. Joy digs all the tunes. It’s funny like that. Such a little weirdo.
Last week I listened to this song a lot: Joy Revolution by Raye Zaragoza. The news of the world is so dark it’s hard to breathe and I used this song as a lemon wedge of joy.
I launched my book, Apples on a Windowsill, this past week in my home town, and I needed to carry some joy into that space. And thanks to Kerry Clare (gem of the universe) mentioning Chelene Knight and her book Let It Go, I found this post on her instagram about showing up and allowing for the conditions of joy.
The conditions of joy: always changing but always possible. Joy is a revelation, a revolution. A wedge of lemon, a duty. So don’t worry if your joy shows up and don’t be angry with it for appearing unannounced on some dark damned afternoon as you sit at your kitchen table stirring milk into your black strong coffee. It’s not going to stay long so be tender with joy. Get out the cookies, even. Joy knows the world is rough, so rough, you don’t even need to tell it what you saw on CNN, all that fuckery.
