Joy as Practice: Part Two

Hello all,

And welcome (back) to the ‘Joy as Practice’ series.

The series has emerged as a response to, and a base from which to find some ground of resistance and resilience amidst the unfolding gravity of what we are witnessing across the globe right now. In small ways, and large ways, I am interested in exploring how creativity, art-making, and intentional practice can build our capacity to be good ancestors in the long arc of justice and time. This month, the focus is on Joy, which I am finding to be a robust and nuanced frame. Welcome to part two in the series.

(If you are listing to the introduction on the recording, I mention the work of Donna Haraway, in relation to her encouragement to ‘Stay with the Trouble’, but I say Donna Hathaway instead! Opps. Cringe!)

Joy as Practice: Part Two

Being with ‘joy’ this week as a guide and companion, I find it so interesting how a single word can shape perception and thus experience. I’ve been reminded how, in fact, joy is not singular nor definitive, but like most emotions or states, spectral.

From my upstairs window, as the weeklong village regatta came to a close, I heard a loud pop then bang, and raced to get a better view. Fireworks!

Boom Red. Boom green, then sparkle. Boom smoke. A lot of it. I laughed as the cloud muted the display and the fireworks turned hazy. What’s combustible is not always predictable and I imagine that was not in the pyrotechician’s plan as, quite literally, smoke got in the way. Below the haze, there was still boom and pop however, and, as I looked on, the half-view image of the display somehow offered more intrigue given the parameters of my expectations had been muted too. I’d never seen a fireworks display like it!

As the smoke dispersed, I found the figurative ‘smoke got in the way’ interpretation of events useful, especially when filtered through the ‘joy as practice’ lens. The fizzy joy of the fireworks may have been clouded over, but now I had a choice: curse the smoke, or enjoy them for what they transpired to be. The latter caught my imagination, for even in their muted form, the fireworks were still dazzling, in a Monty Python, always look on the bright side kind of way.

There have been other pockets of joy this week too: de-heading cosmos flowers to encourage more to grow; swimming in the august warm sea; and navigating the tangle of my current manuscript where and when I found myself in an incredibly tight knot with several unwieldy threads. There was the plot line which has been defying my orders, a character being very mysterious and another being radically mercurial. In the density of the knot, I had a full-blown overwhelming realisation of the mammoth task I have undertaken with so much still to weave, write, edit, and try to get out into the work out into world. I am very far from ‘done’, and as I watched my confidence sink to seabed level, I had one of those days where I cursed the whole thing. But then, ‘joy as practice’ kicked in. Joy, airy it began to bubble, rising to the surface and taking me with it. As I came up for air, I realised that in the fall, then the rising joy, I had been brought to such interesting places, where had I not had the ‘joy of practice’ gauge, I may not have been so quickly defibulated or is it recalibrated. Either way, I have found my beat again. The places? Well there were specifically three.

1. Why I do what I do.

In my cursing of the project, I was forced to remind myself of the deeper ‘why’ behind it; the kind of why that can persevere to unstick even the tightest of knots. ‘Joy’ brought me back to the characters and details and the elements of the story which just won’t leave me alone for want of talking through my pen. Joy gave me back purpose, and purpose lead to the next line, and the next, eventually helping me find a way through the tangles. I am far from there yet, but thankfully, haven’t chucked three years worth of work in the bin! (Hopefully, if/when I get the work out in the world, readers will understand why it has been taking so long). And so, the why in turn brought me back to…

2. The process.

The joy of a storyline clicking into place. Or the exact phrase to plug a gap, or that magic synchronistic confluence of time and place which hands you the right word/image/resource/person to give you the spark to fire it all again. For me this week, that was in the work of other writers… which brings me to…

3. Joy in the inspiring ones.

When I feel a little stuck, I sometimes pick up a book from one of my favourite writers and read a few pages aloud. Then I read them again, this time with a ‘craft’ lens, examining what makes the passage work at the paragraph level, then the line level. I look for details which make it pop, or words which carry particular cadences or resonances which are doing the heavy lifting in the piece. This close reading almost inevitably makes me want to get back to my own work to try to make it better, and also be part of the wider conversation about the role of literature, story, art-making and creativity. So, onwards we go. I am not done yet.

And speaking of inspirations, this week I want to share one of my favourite poems, ‘You Can’t Have It All’, by Barbara Ras.

I shared it recently in the Lúnasa salon, but given its brilliance and relevance to the ‘Joy as Practice’, series, I thought it warranted a stand alone honouring here, and a creative practice to take it further.

I first came across the poem via Maria Popova on what was then Brain Pickings, and now The Marginalian when Maria shared the story of her friend, Emily Levine, who had recently died. It was Emily, Maria wrote, who inspired her own love of poetry, specifically when, to celebrate their friendship and the joy of poetry, they would head off on ‘poetry retreats’, reading, cooking a being together with a small group of friends, and it was was here that Emily would share the Barbara Ras poem (There is a wonderful recording of Emily reading it over this the linked post).

You Can't Have It All


But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

Barbara Ras

One of the things I love about this poem are the quirks and oddities Ras recounts, things as simple as the white foam on a bean pot or news of returning hamsters. They are things which might ordinarily not be named, but by paying attention and naming them as things of delight, or joy, or bounty, or basically, things you get to have, how that in turn, can transform them into treasures.

It’s with this in mind, that I bring you the next creative prompt/ practice in the ‘Joy as Practice’ series, a bonus for paid members of The Wild Edge. It’s a two pronged one, like a tuning fork, and I hope it can help us find our own notes of (poetic) joy. It comes with a nod of gratitude to Barbara Ras, Emily Levine, Maria Popova and to the spirit of poetry itself.

PS: ‘Poetry Retreats’. Now, this has got me thinking… mmmm…. curious, anyone interested?