Joy as Practice: Part One

Hello all,

Below a new series of posts begins, on Joy as Practice. I share little about how the series came about, how August will be shaping up here on the Wild Edge, and for paid members below, a companion creative practice.

Also a reminder that the next poetry salon is tomorrow, Sunday 10th August, 6-7pm Irish/UK time. Paid members, you’ll find the link below.

Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy.

Clare x

Joy as Practice: Part One

A friend of mine turned fifty recently and rather than throwing a party, he decided to embark on a ‘50 Days of Joy’ project, and document the days with a short post online. He lives in Oxford and works in London, and the fifty days straddle his working life and some holidays. Flipping through his photos, there are wandering walks through London parks and Oxford colleges, picnics with friends, dinners with others, and even a couple of magical mystery tours. There were photos of flowers, rivers, trees, waves. There are interesting images of architectural details, paintings, sculptures. And thankfully, on days fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, there are pictures of West Cork, taken when he came to visit to me.

On planning the trip, my message to him was ‘Bring togs. I’ll sort the picnic’. (Togs, to those not familiar with the Irish use of the term, is a swimming costume).

‘Will I freeze?’, he replied.

‘Possibly’, I wrote. Then in the next message. ‘But you will also survive. And earn exceptional kudos to last a few lifetimes’.

What I had not realised it has been forty five years since he last swam in the sea! (There was a brief dip, he later remembered, in the Dead Sea, but he didn’t really count that because it was more a float than a swim).

So, on day sixteen, swimming was added to the Joy Count.

There was, of course, picnics too, and dinners and lots of noticing of the wildflowers and the sea. We laughed until I thought we might burst. It was very much joy filled, and the framing of the project seemed to amplify that joy too.

In preparing this post, I messaged him asking if he would mind if I reference his project. I also asked him what, now on Day 25, he has been noticing in himself. He wrote back, ‘I’m feeling a lot of joy, love, and connection. I have been a funeral today, but the sort of funeral that is mainly a great chance to meet up with people you haven’t seen in years, so even this has been very joyful. I might even do a little more swimming tomorrow!!’.

I’ve been at those kind of funerals, where death and re-connection are entwined, where a life well lived, while held in loss, is also held in celebration.

Since my friend’s visit, we have crossed the Lunasa threshold in the Celtic Calendar, a time for harvest and gathering, of thanks and celebration for the gifts of the land. I have been thinking a lot about his project, and specifically intentional nature of practicing joy. I say ‘practice’ deliberately, for I think it can be a cultivated, and like a muscle, can be intentionally exercised and flexed. With intentional use, I suspect it gets more robust too. Which is what these next series of posts on The Wild Edge will focus on, in an experimental kind of way, with a twist of celebration.

One of my great fears in life is that I will be numb to it. I want to feel things intensely, intently. I want to feel the full spectrum of joy, gladness, sadness, pain, grief, longing, love. I don’t want to travel through this life blind to its beauty, depth, promise or delight. In recent months, seeing the unfolding tragedies on my screen, feeling removed and many times overwhelmed, more than once I have found myself feeling numb, mindlessly scrolling past yet another plea for safety and justice, for dignity and the means for basic survival. It was as if my baseline capacity to witness and empathise was being eroded. And that in turn frightened me.

And so, over the past few weeks, and specifically since my friend’s visit, I too have been intentionally seeking out and naming little pockets of joy. Each moment may be fleeting, but combined, it is as if this baseline is being replenished and already I am noticing my capacity to make, write, engage, listen and respond on the rise. Hosting the recent Vigil for These Times with

Layla O'Mara

and

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

has been part of that replenishment, as too lots more dancing, swimming, yoga and bodywork. Additionally I have been specifically reaching out to friends who I have not seen or been in contact with in some time. And while at times tender and moving, to bear witness and hold vigil, there have been many pocketfuls of delight.

In thinking about the practice of joy, I have also been reminded of a quote I have turned too many times over the years when in dialogue around career, purpose and vocation. It is from the theologian Carl Frederick Buechner, who speaks to the confluence of joy and need in the world. While the overt language of ‘God’ does not resonate with me, the concept of callings does, and it is to this nexus point in the quote that I am drawn,

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet

What interests me in Buechner quote is this intersection; that at the meeting of the waters of gladness and hunger, we can bring our gift, our offerings, our talents, our whole self. I sense that is the nature of a calling; it’s about wholeness and coming into our fullness, otherwise, I am assuming, it would not be a true calling. And so in the act of seeking to fulfil our own promise of ourselves to ourselves, that is, to come into our own wholeness, we are aided too when it is done with the intention to service to the world. To do that we must be alert and alive to these callings. And it is in this sense that joy, or gladness, is highly consequential, for if we can not name, notice and honour what brings us deep gladness, then we may never reach that confluence nor what or who we may serve on the other side of it.

Mary Oliver circles similar terrain of gladness in her poem, ‘Don’t Hesitate’. I just love the opening, and where it takes us to.

Don't Hesitate

by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

To Oliver, ‘Joy is not made to a crumb’, and is most noticeable in those moments when love stirs. Love was never made to be crumb to her either. Throughout her entire body of work we encounter, over and over again, an all encompassing love of the natural world in particular. From the cricket to the bear, from the stars to the moss, each held their own gravity in the weight of what is worthy of our attention. Giving into to it, the joy and the love, is in her reckoning, a ‘way of fighting back’. Joy as resilience, joy as resistance.

There have been other writers straddling the joy as resistance and resilience stronghold too. Audre Lorde has written that in the face of oppression, joy gives us ‘energy for change’. It is a catalyst in that sense, joy as a starter. I’m thinking of sourdough cultures as I write this, the bubbling up and the way the initial dough, once activated, becomes the substrate which keeps the essence of future generations alive. Once feed, the culture becomes the base energy for the rise. Joy, in Lorde’s cultural weighting, is the equivalent of the sourdough starter. It gives rise too.

Equally similarly, the writer and activist, Adrienne Marie Brown, makes references to this kind of joy in her book, ‘Pleasure Activism’, as outlined in her introduction,

“My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognise that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing.

― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

To collectively orient around pleasure and longing as a form of resilience, is what I think is at the essence of my friend’s ’50 Days of Joy’. It’s also at the heart of this celtic season of Lúnasa, this time of giving thanks and honouring the land; the joy of the harvest, and for our gifts- of land, of heart, of hands.

So, with all that in mind, for the rest of August I have decided to give The Wild Edge, a joy injection, and with it some creative invitations. For the next four weeks, I am going to pause the ‘press pause’ posts and instead offer a short series called ‘Joy as Practice’. There will be some poems, some more quotes. The bulk of each post will be available to all members of The Wild Edge, and then for paid subscribers there will a small addition- a joyful creative prompt, an extra reading or some images to help us reflect. And each week I’ll open up a chat thread for paid members where we too can share our joy-filled or gladness-filled noticings.

In addition, on Sunday August 10^th, I’ll be hosting our Wild Edge Poetry Salon, and I’ll weave some further poems in there too.

I also want to flag, that for the month, I am pausing hosting ‘Owl Hours’. I am carving some time to work on my current manuscript, and aside from these posts and the salon, I am trying to stay offline as much as possible. But Owl Hours will be back in September, and I’ve some ideas!

I want to dedicated this to my friend for his 50 Days of Joy inspiration. I hope it has a ripple effect, way beyond.

To kickstart our ‘Joy as Practice’ series, I have a short creative prompt, The Joy-Makers Ledger to get us stirring and noticing…

Welcome.