The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy - it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. Ringleted by these sort of vaginal bloomsīlooms forth with her forehead dusted goldĬomplement with Borges on collective joy and collective grief and the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Ross Gay on what it takes to grow up and what it means to have grown.

Would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning This animating spirit of joy as a force-field of connection comes alive in Gay’s poem “Patience” from his altogether vivifying collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude ( public library):

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow - which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow - might draw us together. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. Tapping into that microrhizal mesh that stretches between us - between all of our individual joys and sorrows, lacing them together into an ecology of interdependence - is our surest way of tapping into joy itself. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie - we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it.

A rhizomatic care I so often forget to notice I am every second in the midst of. Though I didn’t yet have the words for it, planting that orchard - by which I mean… joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be - reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future. With an eye to the community orchard he helped create - a “long sweaty collaborative dream” - Gay writes: (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy ( public library) - a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights. All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.Īll joy is the act of remembering - the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.

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