This poem is a consolidation of work I have done around grief and its integration into the fabric of living. Ultimately, grief is to me part of what underpins joy; with practice, we can access joy in grief.
I was asked by someone to contribute a piece about grief for an anthology, though at present this seems to be on hold. This was where the prompt led me.
I managed to listen to a few sessions from the 2022 Global Joy Summit. The focus of the second day was The Inseparability of Joy and Sorrow. I have long defined joy itself not as an emotion but as a way of being. What struck me was that there can be in every emotion a passage to joy.
We often separate our emotions into those we find difficult and those we think of as pleasurable. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that all our emotions rise up from our inner wilds. Every emotion brings its own gifts, and, with self-compassion, we have the ability to befriend them and channel them for the greatest good of self and others. But every emotion, even those we may think of as ‘positive’, has a shadow capacity for harm if allowed to run amok.
Anger
It’s easy to see that anger can be destructive. However, at its best, anger is also protective. It flags to us when our boundaries are being breached, when we are veering off course. It can also usefully inspire us to activism in response to perceived injustices, provide an impetus for change.
But, as a red-headed Celt, I know only too well the pain I can inflict on myself and others when, instead of being able to observe and be with my anger, I flare into a spike of adrenalin and words I will inevitably regret.
If an emotion is causing harm, it is likely turning sour.
I learned as a child to suppress my anger. I was ‘baited’ by my peers once they discovered I had a temper. So, for too long, I didn’t listen to its voice until I was overwhelmed by it. It has taken me many decades to begin to learn instead to recognize anger’s promptings, to acknowledge these both internally and with a brief expression, but then to attempt to stand back, breathe, and to see what is really required. Often the question is ‘what do I (or we) need to do differently?’ It may involve a re-stating of boundaries. I definitely find humor a helpful tool in defusing the moment. I think I am still better at accessing compassion for others than self-compassion though.
For me, anger’s relationship to joy is that it brings me back to my authentic self by enabling me to uphold my personal boundaries. It takes me to the place of what the Dalai Lama terms wise selfishness, a key component in cultivating joy. And when my anger is aroused by social issues, it ignites my compassion and connects me to an awareness of our shared humanity, at the heart of which is joy.
Sadness and grief
More than anything, sadness speaks to what we care about. Sadness and grief underpin our humanity.
Tears mark what is sacred.
Life is never static. Sadness and grief orient us to loss and impermanence. They draw us to necessary reflection, a slowing into quietness, ultimately to an understanding of the importance of presence in the moment. The root of grief is often love.
To be able to sit with sadness and grief is vitally important. If we try to block out the pain, it will stay with us, haunt us, and we will become stuck in a destructive cycle.
The acceptance of impermanence, that all things, all emotions pass – so implicit in grief and sadness – is another cornerstone of joy.
Happiness
‘Can happiness ever become excessive?’, I wondered.
We think of happiness as a positive emotion. Mostly it is, nourishing our sense of wellbeing. Finding delight in the everyday is no small part of the way in which I cultivate my capacity for joy. I talked about this in my post Joy and delight in challenging times.
I recognize in myself, though, a tendency sometimes to let the good times spiral. We speak of high mood, high energy, high times. Yet that ‘high’ too easily can take on an addictive edge, become excessive pleasure seeking, or pull us towards something more like mania or obsession.
I think that the acknowledgement of toxic positivity implies a recognition that there can be a distortion when we overemphasize ‘positive’ emotions and avoid the ‘negative’. Avoidance is a form of resistance and ultimately what we resist persists and can easily become poisonousto self and others.
It is interesting to look deeply at the emotions we term ‘positive’ and take heed of their shadows as well as to look for the gifts within those we experience as ‘difficult’.
Owning opportunities for growth, new insights, the deepening of our humanity and compassion by truly experiencing what we feel, is very different from avoidance. To me it implies that awareness of the thread that connects us to joy even when we are in the midst of suffering.
Friending the inner wilds
Our emotions are our constant companions. Too often, though, we fail to become truly familiar with them. We need our passions, for all their wildness. The more we are able to sit with them, to listen, to be, to let them flow through us, the easier it becomes to see all our emotions as friends rather than threats and to appreciate what they do for us. At the same time, we may gain an understanding of the ways in which we habitually inflate their more harmful aspects and develop strategies to defuse these.
This is a very personal process. Emotions are not as universally recognizable as we tend to think. At a macro level, recent research highlights cultural differences in emotional experience and expression. This implies to me that our individual emotions will have been shaded by all the different layers of culture.
My understanding of the gifts and the shadows in any emotion may not fit your experience. There are no short cuts or quick fixes. There is significant work involved in looking at the emotions that shape your life, including those you think of as ‘easy’ or ‘good’. Developing friendship and real understanding requires an investment of time, openness, and self-compassion.
In an earlier post on Love in the shadows I referred to the shadow hordes, a way in which I give identity to feelings and shadows by personifying them. I find this a useful technique through which to amplify my ability to recognize and relate to my emotions.
I believe that deep in the heart of the wilds is a quiet, peaceful, deeply compassionate space suffused with joy. Occasionally we catch glimpses of it, in ourselves, but more especially in great spiritual leaders like Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama. I don’t think we are meant to live there all the time. We are meant to feel. Those feelings are part of the richness of our living. Our responsibility is to learn to respond to what we feel appropriately rather than simply to react and to appreciate the gifts our feelings hold.
Learning from the lake
What makes watching the lake so mesmerizing is its state of constant change. It does not, as far as I can tell, resist the whipping of its waves by the wind or the transition to ice in winter. Sometimes it sparkles, diamond strewn. Sometimes it hypnotizes me with the intersecting patterns of its ripples. Sometimes the depth of its stillness fills me with a quiet sense of awe. Different facets of its character are revealed by every change of light. To me, it is never anything but beautiful. And, always, I am aware of a sense of constancy and calm in its depths, no matter how its surface is interacting with the world.
In the beginning was the Word . . . Although I don’t identify as Christian so much as Multi-faith or ‘Faith embracing’, that phrase has always resonated at some deep level within me.
Words, language, and the way in which we use them hold such power. Today, savouring my reading of the wonderful Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer gifted me with one of those precious moments of illumination that shift the world on its axis.
A language of things
I had never particularly thought about how the distribution of a particular type of word in a language may mediate our relationship with the world. English is a noun-based language, a language of things. We make that which is not human an ‘it’, an object. Potentially, in so doing, we create a barrier between the human and everything else that makes it much easier to disrespect, despoil and destroy. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, the words of being and doing.
Winter Lake Illumination
A language of being
Learning her ancestral language, Potawatomi, Robin Wall Kimmerer was initially bewildered to discover that 70 percent of its words are verbs and that, whilst there is no dividing the world into masculine and feminine, the use of language is shaped by whether something is perceived as animate or inanimate.
It was the word for ‘bay’, which reads more like ‘to be a bay’, that provided that vital spark of understanding.
In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. . . But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.
This ‘grammar of animacy’ extends not just to plants and animals. It includes rocks and mountains, water and fire, places, sacred medicines, songs, drums, stories – anything that is imbued with spirit. The inanimate forms of language are largely reserved for objects made by people. It strikes me that, in our English speaking and many other Western cultures, our art, our music, our poetry is often an attempt to reclaim animacy.
Animate or inanimate?
I remember my daughter at a very young age fascinated by making the distinction between male and female, boy and girl. Today I find myself looking around me with the same fascination, trying to distinguish between animate and inanimate.
I hold up a small candle, burning in a glass jar. The glass and the candle itself feel inanimate, though the changing state of the wax gives me pause for thought. But the flame is so obviously animate.
Looking at my nightstand, made from reclaimed wood, I address it as something inanimate, but which has also once been animate. I wonder, though, if a table imbued with love, with a reverence for the tree from which it is hewn, built with artistry and skill, is animate or inanimate?
‘Somebody’ who visits almost daily
In truth, I identified at least to some extent as an animist from my teens, so this is not entirely new territory. The last five years, living so close to nature, this sense has bubbled up with increasing vigour. I perceive the Lake as my greatest teacher, so obviously ‘alive’. I automatically think of the creatures we see or become aware of as beings, as ‘somebody’, even the ticks and the mosquitoes! Likewise, the trees and plants, with whom my relationship deepens as each season passes. This sense of animacy and its implicit connectedness is part of the underpinning of my sense of joy.
I can’t help wondering, now, how other languages reflect and shape their speakers’ relationship with the world – what a fascinating area of study for one of my parallel lives.
Braiding silence with animacy
How wonderful it would be to have a living language, imbued with this sense of being, in which to think and speak and write. Some thirty years ago, I wrote a poem entitled The Speaking of Silence. I still aspire to learning the language of silence. But now I would wish to find some way to braid it together with the language of animacy.
What is the relationship between joy and delight and how can we cultivate joy and delight in challenging times?
Joy and delight
I think those things that delight us may often connect us to joy. But for me joy has more of a sense of rapture, bliss, ecstasy, and transcendence than delight.
In my 2019 post Revisiting Joy I described joy as a momentary glimpse of absolute belonging within the flow of all that is, a moment of total connectedness and as existing only in the ‘now’.Saint Thomas Aquinas describes joys as ‘delights of the soul’ – yes, this sums up the distinction beautifully.
Opening to joy and delight in challenging times
In challenging times, I believe it becomes more important than ever to nurture and tap into joy as an underpinning of resilience and hope. I have worked consciously for more than a decade to cultivate the capacity for joy. So part of my ability to remain open to joy is simply ‘practice’. A key element of that practice is regularly and consciously opening out my senses into the now. Over time, this has become a normal way of being. This brings with it a constant stream of small joys that feed my soul and connect me to all that is. That sense of connection is fundamental to my understanding of joy.
Cultivating our capacity to experience joy is also a process of honing our ability to connect, as well as to contain and to accept every shading of existence. This encompasses both the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ world, which in the end is simply another manifestation of all that is whether you define this spiritually or in terms of particulate matter.
Implicit in and emerging out of ‘connection’ are love and compassion for all beings.
If you develop a strong sense of concern for the well-being of all sentient beings and in particular human beings, this will make you happy in the morning, even before coffee . . . Joy is a way of approaching the world.
Perhaps, too, the recognition of the existence of that unlimited capacity to encompass both the ecstasy and the agony of living and being human, both heart-filling and heart-breaking enables me to maintain my connection to joy even in times of suffering.
There are, of course, moments when I lose the connection, times of utter weariness and despair. But I have learned that these times pass, to rest easy with them. I don’t force my way back. But I do try to continue to open my awareness, to some extent to ‘fake it till I make it’, to rest in faith. I retain a sense of trust in the calm that runs underneath the turbulence always.
Delight in the everyday
I am constitutionally curious, and my curiosity reaps an abundance of delights!
Sometimes what draws me is something not previously perceived in an everyday experience; the musicality of dancing across frozen ‘puddle-drums’; the shadows cast by individual pieces of gravel on the road in the stark, bright sunlight of an early winter’s afternoon; the exquisite crystals forming at the bottom of a bottle of maple syrup. It might be natural beauty, which often illuminates some interiority. Or perhaps an interaction with another being; the infectious chuckle of a baby; a leisurely conversation with a dear friend; the knowledge that, in some small way, I have been able to make a difference, whether to loved-one or stranger; the now familiar gentle knock of our favourite squirrel on the window; the regular visits of the Cardinal lighting up our bird-feeder. Invariably, implicit in the flashes of joy there is some sense of flow and connectedness.
I realize that joy is often, for me, a multi-layered experience that instinctively links me with deeper knowing. I feel delight in what my senses are gifting me; the breathtaking majesty of a mountain range; the wondrous lake that is the backdrop to my life; the fractious flurry of goldfinches fighting for a place at the window feeder; the scent of lavender. But beyond that delight exist additional layers, rooted in association, symbol and insight.
My eyes may be drawn to the mountains, but the soaring of my soul reflects an awe that extends my awareness outwards into all of creation.
The lake tethers me to the constancy of change. it reminds me that there is a place of deep calm within me too that remains even in the midst of the wind’s tumult or the immobility of ice. I remember that it is the moments of absolute stillness that most fully reflect the light.
My delight in the goldfinches links me back to my Grandfather’s love of ‘all things great and small’ and to the benediction of his transmitted wisdom. The lavender is my Grandmother’s gentle, loving presence.
These do not need to be conscious or articulated thought processes. But as I have cultivated joy, they increasingly underpin and amplify my experience. Joy, it seems, for me at least, can be cumulative.
Bodily delight
Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes bodily delights from the delights of the soul and thus joy. I’m guessing he is referring here to ‘pleasure’ and ‘sensation’. I think, though, there are other dimensions to bodily delight.
Like many of us as we age, I see my mother in my hands. I sometimes hear her in the words that emerge from my mouth. I think the delight I feel lies in a sense of recognition, perhaps even of presence, of continuity and, again, of connection.
As I spoon round my husband each morning, there is always a flash of joy. Yes, that dear familiarity, that skin on skin delight in touch is still the first layer, even 30 years on. But it also connects me to the whole of our history together, all the growth, learning and co-creation, the deepening of mature love.
And, recently, I seem to have moved into a new relationship with my body as simultaneously separate from and integral to that which constitutes ‘I am’. With this has come an unaccustomed tenderness and compassion, as well as a stream of fresh awareness and delight. A fleeting perception of my body as a community of cells within that greater community that is existence was just the kind of momentary glimpse of absolute belonging within the flow of all that is that forms part of my definition of joy.
Joy and gratitude as an act of resistance
Whether it’s the transcendent joy of sacred ritual or the simple joy of cultivating a garden, the pursuit of joy amid great struggle is a way to tend our humanity when it is most threatened. . . Joy is also a manifestation of abundance.
Although a key focus of my life has been an ability to help create the circumstances that support change for individuals and organizations, I’ve never really identified as an activist. I have always believed that the deepest and most enduring change always begins with the individual. So in looking at joy and gratitude in the context of resistance my focus is a more subtle, personal form of resistance.
At the most basic level, if joy underpins resilience and hope then it offers each one of us resistance against the negative emotions, the despair that might otherwise overwhelm us in dark times. There is great power in this.
To lay claim to joy and gratitude when the collective mood is one of loss, fear, grief and anger is to reassert our humanity, our vitality. By choosing to cultivate our capacity for joy, we retain the ability to expand rather than contract, which in turn drives our ability to embrace and energize change and so to move forward.
Similarly, in challenging times, the rootedness of joy in connection holds back the tides of isolation and alienation, certainly for self and possibly for others. We remain able to function from an abundance mindset.
Whilst it may seem counterintuitive to be joyful in the face of social ills and struggle, joy actually increases our ability to engage with the world empathically and effectively.
The more we turn toward others, the more joy we experience, and the more joy we experience, the more we can bring joy to others. The goal is not just to create joy for ourselves but . . . to be a reservoir of joy, an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that can ripple out to all those around you.
These last few difficult months have gifted many of us with an opportunity to turn our gaze inward. Although I have, like most people, struggled at times, I have been surprised to discover an increasingly persistent undercurrent of joy. Sometimes this brings feelings of guilt. How can it be OK to experience joy when so many are suffering?
This takes me back to that sense of joy as underpinning the capacity to encompass both the ecstasy and the agony of living and being human. Those of us who are able to tap into this capacity and to keep joy alive are, to an extent, light bringers and keepers of the flame. I can’t think of a much more profound act of resistance.
In these challenging times, it is hardly surprising when fear creates a knotted tangle of resistance, control mechanisms, and doubt. It can be difficult to hold on to an awareness of light.
Awe versus awful
A friend commented to me that maintaining an awareness of awe didn’t seem to help that much when instead faced with awful. I think the reality is that awe, wonder and gratitude are important in nourishing joy and resilience. They are not a preventative measure or an insurance policy – life happens. But greater resilience and the ability to find joy in even small, everyday things, can provide the necessary glimmer of light to help you get through the tough times.
Not mine to fix
It is easy to find oneself on a slippery slope of self-blame or loss of faith when life doesn’t go as you hoped and expected, when illness or adversity strike. I realized in the last week that, whilst I am mostly able to understand and accept that it is not up to me to fix others, there is a part of me that wants to cling to the belief that, if I ‘do it right’, I can fix myself. It was illuminating and freeing to understand that it is also not up to me to fix myself!
I may aspire to physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, may do my best to adopt positive choices and practices. But it is not a weakness, a failing in myself, if physical or emotional issues do not resolve immediately in response to my actions – or even ever. I simply do not have that level of control over life – no one does. There is no point, therefore, in judging and finding myself wanting. Nor does this invalidate the choices and practices. What I can do is sit with myself compassionately and with acceptance of what is. I can listen deeply for what I need and tap into that ability to connect with resilience and joy and the underpinning awareness that the light is always there.
Shining a light
When we align with who we really are, who-what we are designed to be, we unfurl. Benefit in all directions abounds that has little to do with us. We are simply being . . . and the benefit that happens, in a way, is none of our business.
~ Kim Rosen
Sitting in meditation with these ideas swirling around me, I had a delightfully ‘silly moment’ when the thought that popped into my head was ‘I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up!’ Beyond the thought, though, lies a deepening understanding that it is not mine to fix anyone and a continuing commitment to the growth of authenticity. This is helping to reframe my ongoing desire to ‘make a difference’. It struck me that this was a personal expression of what Kim Rosen suggests in the quote above (revisited from my Soul School post). Playing with the thought, the poem below was my destination!
I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up!
I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up, to stand tall and true at the edge of the world mostly unremarked and unremarkable but there, a steady light radiating outwards from within.
It is none of my business whether the light is witnessed or serves any purpose.
But, on the darkest nights, when storms rage and rocks reveal their fangs, just maybe my light may ease some being’s passage and help them come home to themself.
