Rekindling Joy

On finding pleasure in the unbearable

Hello! Thank you so much for being here.

Towards the end of November I finally polished and published my first post, and for the next few days I floated along, aglow with the giddy surrender of the Fool as he toasts the world with a Rose and strides beyond the cliff.

In that liminality I felt like a soda can that had just been pierced open, effervescing and wading in the joy surrounding me. It was surreal, after a season of so much collective and personal grief, to feel a pleasure so whole. I danced through the dishes, capered through the laundry, and undulated from room to room to room.

In all my Sorrow, and Rage, and Dread I’d been fully neglecting Joy. Now, having reignited my written conversation with the world, I blissfully became like a river remembering a lost part of itself. Toni Morrison told us—“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” And so I, like the Mississippi, breathed in, stretched, and spread back into place.

Then the madnesses and deep rests of early winter came, and through it all I continued to find an abundance of joy. It was there when I reveled in the quiet, and wrote in poems and fragments, and when I held a beloved baby, watching him discover the black and white pictures his eyes were just beginning to see. I felt it when I shared my table with family, chosen and otherwise, as we figured out how to release our Christmas crackers into magic tricks and crowns. It bounded within me as I watched a cat, Charlie, wander the top of the kitchen cupboards while his companion, Jimmy, rollicked through polkas during my banjo lesson. And it flowed through my fingers as I drove through the first great snowfall in years and watched Boston’s greys fade into ballets of softness and light.

But as the first weeks of the new year wore on I began to shrink, suddenly bewildered by all that was rushing toward us. I found myself in a place where pleasure seemed indulgent and impossible to prioritize as I waited for the words of tyranny to turn into their promised extinguishings and ruptures. My joy faded like smoke.

Now it’s become February and I’m reflecting on how, in the wake of November’s effervescent days, I’d demanded that my joy not be stolen. And yet I gave it away, forgetting the promise I’d made and the truth I’ve learned, over and over again, that delights, and their penchant to gather into Joy, are sacred. Joy reminds us of our purpose for being here on Earth.

I know this, yet all the sorrow within me keens. How could anyone seek and savor pleasure while looking fascism in the eye?

At the beginning of his brilliant collection of essays “Inciting Joy,” Ross Gay writes of people who come up to him at the end of readings saying things like “‘I didn’t know you could write about joy,’” and “‘I have always been told that you can’t write about joy because it’s not serious,’” and “‘When all of this is going on’”—here Ross describes the speaker holding “his hands up as though to imply war; famine; people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children; disease; sorrow immense and imperturbable; it only getting worse and worse and worse (dude had big hands)—‘why would you write about joy?’”

Well, Gay says, “what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay ‘Joy’ calls ‘the intolerable,’ for its existence?”

When I read these words my blood purrs. I remember that the closer I know our capacity for destruction, and the better I know death, and the more I understand how much rage my heart can bear, the dearer I hold Joy. This River, like both Morrison’s Mississippi and Heraclitus’s, is ever changing. I’m hungry and ready to carve and heave and smash against all that is trying to hold us back.

To remember our shapes and make room for joy I welcome us to surrender to a redevotion or discovery of craft. Your craft—the practice that, when you’re fully in it, makes you feel most whole. Even when you’re wrestling with it, even when you’re mad at it, even when you’re coaxing it and whispering and waiting for it to run through you, your craft is the thing you hunger for when you spend too much time away from it. The thing that, when you and that craft are embracing one another, leaves you feeling rinsed and blessed and open. The more we make room for it; the more we feed it with hours spent sketching and tending and weeding and feeding; the more we caress the clay and rework the sentence and keep the yolk from breaking; the more we tend to it the more we’re tended back. And the better tended our hearts the better we can tend to one other. The rich wholeness our craft brings us not only nudges us back into our true selves and our place in the wild universe, but it also leaves us more receptive to joy.

The Fool with whom I began this essay, he with the sun at his back and the cliff welcoming him into lush mystery, is the very first card in the tarot deck. We all begin as that wild strider and we all step into the unknown again and again. As we grow and transform we gain experience and begin to expect what’s coming despite the eternal mystery of what’s behind every next bend. Some of it is marvelous, some of it gutting. Lately the sorrows have grown so great that I recently dreamt of Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” and my slumbering mind debated itself on how it would all end as Los Angeles burned and Florida froze. Meanwhile the powers that be are doing their best to round up children and build brand new concentration camps and destroy the Trans community. We are surrounded by terrors.

Still, we cannot abandon joy. Remembering and savoring and cultivating joy doesn’t mean that we don’t also grieve for all that makes us ache and fight. Just as choosing to gather collectively is paramount to understanding and demanding the justice we need, prioritizing joy so that we can remember ourselves and why we need one other is equally essential. Our rivers are longing to flood; the water leaping in delight, the dams being battered by all the muscle we share.

And so I’m going to New Bedford with one of my best friends because last year we started a two person book club and read Moby Dick and by God we’re going to finally see where Ishmael stepped. Today I let my sweetheart take me on a walk and we watched Beech leaves skate along the pond, milky with ice. I’m watering the houseplants and singing in the community choir and exchanging videos with one of my best friend’s kids; he plays his tiny drum set and sings Beatles songs with his mom while I let him know little etymologies behind words he asks me about—spoon, button, fish. I’m planning for the next growing season. I’m gathering with those I love for pleasure and for plans. I’m writing and remembering and learning how to use my craft and skills and body to be here for this world.

As we all take the step toward what comes next I hold our crafts and joys close and pray that we may allow our pleasure to unleash itself—if only for a moment—from all that’s working so hard to keep us bridled. May we find joy alongside the unbearable and in the enormous darkness of the black and beautiful night, with stars whispering their light and the whole of it stretching above and between us and our sorrows, our refusals, and our power. May we kindle our craft and rekindle one other.