On Joy

Pandemic, self-quarantine, unrelenting existential dread. How could 2020 possibly be a joyful year, at this point? I could tell myself all the stories about why now is not the time to write about joy, put this aside. Or I can write what I know, beginning with the fact that Joy is whole and complex just like everything else.

I think that Joy is most profoundly felt in people who have learned non-attachment. Non-attachment, vairagya in yoga, means participating in life and making efforts for their own sake, with no expectation of any certain outcome. This is hard for us. We don’t want to “waste” our efforts, we want to control the quality of our outcome by purifying the quality of our efforts. We think if we go to yoga in the perfect frame of mind, with the perfect intention, then we will do every pose perfectly, and feel perfect later. Then when we find ourselves imperfect to begin with, we don’t go in to the class because our “head is not in the right place.” But that’s not how effort and purifying work. Sometimes, even with serious consequences at stake, our most valiant effort is followed by devastating failure. Sometimes we’re physically caring for someone we love with a terminal illness, knowing they will die and we can’t stop it. Or maybe all our plans and income fall apart because of a global disaster.

Personally, I finished a bar exam two weeks before my father took his life. I was VERY attached to how good it would feel to tell him that I passed, because I built a lot of toxic perfectionism around the frame of pleasing him in a particular “first child achiever” type of way. My feelings when I did find out I passed, were pretty fucking complex. I did a lot of letting go that year, whether I recognized it at the time or not. When we scattered his ashes at Cape Flattery in Washington, there were warm and Joyful family moments that only we shared and I will never forget. What I know now is, to be able to make my biggest, realest effort, purely for its own sake, requires a LOT of self love. It also requires the “awareness in the present” that mindfulness practices cultivate.

My 2020 had some hard moments around the time we should have been advised about the COVID-19 emergence. Unrelated to the earliest signs of the global pandemic, my friend died after a two-year battle with ALS. ALS is a heartbreaking thing to learn about when you learn that someone has it. She was my friend through her son, a dear person to me, who I never felt I could help or comfort as each new day, week, month brought new stresses and pains. He was able to do his job remotely, so he and his sister both moved back to Mississippi to be able to spend time with their mother and take care of her. In 2018, when she could still walk, and could speak, he invited our small group of Soul Friends to spend the weekend with her. We all got to be together, which we hadn’t managed in many years of jobs and marriages and kids and moves. We got to have deep and truthful conversations about what we have meant to each other over this time, and we got all the hugs and back rubs and dog love. We cooked together, and worked on nutritious, soft foods she could swallow. Her birthday is three days after mine, and I made a lemon Charlotte Russe and a winter vegetable risotto that she really liked. I cried as soon as I smelled the inside of her house, and I wanted to cling to every second, to her, to my people. We all took a long walk by her creek with her and the dogs, and held onto a big group hug before we left. I cried for the first half hour of the ride home when we had to leave.

In January of this year, we returned to that family home, for the first time without her. She had demanded a Celebration of Life as a service. In the cold and sun, we set up all the spaces to host visitors, and painted and crafted, cried and chatted. At night by the fire pit, we worked on the music for the service, and had epic dance parties with all our songs from back when. Personally, I think exuberant dancing should be prescribed during hard times. I think it calls Joy up into the body and mind. During the Grief Dance Parties, we dropped to the ground to pump out pushups, screamed out all our power songs, stomped, opened and moved our hips, cried, hugged, had rapid-fire conversations about any and everything. We BREATHED. Hard. I learned a lot about my friend from conversations with others who knew her, and I got to know people in her family who I had never spent most-of-three-days with before. Every person was in pain, noticing her absence, seeing her tiny dog and constant companion continue to look for her, wondering and worrying about the immediate family. But our collective presence and attention was vital, healing, and Joyful.

All of that openness sent me on a hard wave of passing back through my grief at my father’s death, which I knew it would. But it did it in an unexpected way this time. We sang Joan Baez’s “Let Your Love Flow,” at the celebration, which I put on when I got home. Her version of “The Water Is Wide” was our family song when “our family” meant both of my biological parents and my sister. We each had a verse, and harmonies. Dad played guitar beautifully. I probably haven’t listened to that song since my Dad’s service, or shortly after. It hurts so much. So in the early winter, as I felt that hurt, and breathed, and stayed open to it, I realized that although my Mom is alive and thriving, and I get to hear her sing and sing with her somewhat regularly, I haven’t heard her voice on that verse since the last time we all sang “The Water Is Wide” together. I’m not sure when that would have been, exactly. But one time, I heard the sound of our voices together for the last time. Would we have put our efforts into that sound in a different way, if we had known? Would we have been less open, the sound less intimate, if we had thought to protect ourselves from the grief we have all now been through?

Joy, as I think of it now, does not mean “euphoria” or “ecstasy,” which to me imply de-connecting or detaching. Those may appear alongside Joy in some moments, but they are different from it. Joy tends to appear in clarity, and it often accompanies pain. Ursula K. LeGuin describes Joy as “gladness without reason” in The Left Hand of Darkness. In the novel, the two main characters are on a difficult and depriving journey. They have only day in and day out of maximum effort with not enough provisions. The novel’s main focus during this time is the characters’ development of a close friendship and deep affinity for each other. Their relationship is described as particularly special, containing a shared experience of Joy that cannot be replicated after they accomplish their mission and get back to civilization.

In music, Joanna Newsom’s extraordinary “Time, As A Symptom” is full of lyrical gems, one of which describes “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating Joy of life.” I find truth in these sentiments, that real, genuine Joy often comes at the cost of great effort and loss. That the basic experience of Joy does not depend on comfortable or “happy” circumstances. Joy is connection without attachment. Euphoria and elation imply a dizzying lift away from connection that is gone as soon as the immediate feeling is disrupted. Euphoria and elation and ecstasy are delicate. Joy is powerful. Newsom’s song also says

The moment of your greatest joy sustains
Not axe nor hammer, tumor, tremor
Can ever take it away, and it remains
It remains

Joy is indestructible. Memories of joyful experiences can be some of the most vivid. Joy can feel like profound self connection, or mutual connection. It is a type of intimacy. It requires openness to one’s Self, and to others’ Selves, and humans love these feelings. Joy hangs around the corner from grief and pain because we need it to survive life’s inevitable griefs and pains. Joy shows up to lift us and remind us of Love. What I know now is that the end of a single experience of Joy is not its destruction. It remains, accessible in the clearest and surest parts of my memory, and probably around the corner from the next disaster.

Because I want to leave this with something strong that you can dance to, and I hope you will.