The Joy Report
What I'm Carrying, and What Carries Me
A month ago, a long-held dream came true. For years I’d lived vicariously through others’ posts about the Festival of Faith and Writing, a bustling and bubbly conference for writers, readers, and everyone in between, held every other year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Many were the reasons I couldn’t attend in years past—for a long time my kids were too little for me to be away that long, and then the festival always seemed to occur during their spring break—not a great time for us to be down an adult!
But this year, Eric encouraged me to go, with his unflappable “we’ll figure it out” energy, and my parents came in town to help ferry the kids to their morning art camps and hang out with them in the afternoons. (My deepest thanks to every person who makes it possible for writer parents to write!)
Let me tell you: I have been flying high ever since I got home. Three days together with people who love language, care deeply about craft, and believe in the power and restorative beauty of the written word was a balm in Gilead if ever there was one. Ross Gay was there (Ross Gay!!) and Robin Wall Kimmerer and Barbara Brown Taylor, and so many other inspiring writers, poets, and artists. It was an incredible reminder of our calling, and of the joy of it all, to say nothing of getting to see dear friends and finally meet (and hug!) people I’ve loved for ages through a phone screen.
I scribbled so many notes and thoughts and questions, and more ideas opened up like spring buds in my mind than I know what to do with. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s talk posed and answered the question, what is the role of the nature writer? In the margins of my notes I scrawled: what is the role of…my writing? I wrote down the first things that came to mind: that I write to reconnect us, that I write (never ever with AI) to remain defiantly human, and that I write to create a collective space for grief. That last one is especially true on Instagram, where I often post prayers and laments and respond to the news with a broken heart. I think of it as a really important part of my mission and calling, and I’m constitutionally incapable of turning away from the truth of what’s happening in our country and in our world. I hope, like my hero Etty Hillesum, to look things straight in the eye.
But the idea that started to shake loose for me at the festival was that I also want to create a collective space for joy.
We’ve all heard for years that joy is resistance, and I firmly believe that is true. Joy takes on a special, powerful form in people who are oppressed and persecuted—it can become a physical garment they wrap around themselves for protection. But for years I have wondered if that maxim applies to me. I am grieved, yes, but by no means oppressed. And yet I can’t deny that, well, in the face of gestures at everything, I think joy as resistance most likely applies in a broad sense to all of us, at least those of us clinging to better hopes for the human project.
I thought of the everyday joys celebrated by Ross Gay in The Book of Delights and so many of his other books. I thought of artist Scott Erickson sharing artist Lisa Congdon’s advice: that we have to keep the joy engine running. I thought of Dorothy Day, always calling us to the duty of delight. I thought of Corita Kent, insisting that “the commonplace is not worthless—there is simply lots of it.” I thought of Nabokov delighting in shapes and colors, in tricks of the light and names of plants. I thought of William Blake’s poem “Eternity,” which I loved so much that I painted it on a plate at one of those paint-a-piece places as a teenager: “He who binds to himself a joy/ Does the winged life destroy/ He who kisses the joy as it flies/ Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
Joy, I think, is inextricably linked to attention. And that is good news, because it means that every day is a treasure hunt for something beautiful, something unexpected, something moving, something completely ordinary that strikes you in an extraordinary way. (Do I wax ecstatic about a discarded electric toothbrush sticking out of a trash bin in my book about attention? Why yes, yes, I do.)
I’d like to make this a group project. Will you give me your joy report? Will you share with me the delight of your day, the thing that made you pause in wonder or laugh or run to your notebook with a pencil? It could be the way that a line of open trunks at grocery pickup look like gaping maws, waiting to gobble the week’s provisions. It could be the way that rhododendrons with dark centers resemble, from afar, technicolor clots of caviar. It could be the way said rhododendron blossoms feel in your hand (thick, cold, surprisingly fleshy, for the record). It could be a Led Zeppelin song on the radio (tell me I’m not the last person on earth who flips through the radio stations until something thrilling comes across the airwaves).
Joy, I think, is all entangled with something I like to call sacred specificity—the details that make your life, your home, your town, your family unique. You see, hear, touch, smell, taste things that no one else will. Grab hold of them. Enjoy them. And let that joy fuel you for all the looking-things-straight-in-the-eye you have to do for the rest of the hour, the day, the week.
What can I tell you about gathering up a joy report, a delight of the day?
I can tell you that last week I spilled a cappuccino in the car, and as it splashed into the fabric of the driver’s seat, disturbing my appreciation for the fact that the drink is named after the color of Capuchin monks’ robes, I worried about the milk turning and smelling rotten. Instead, for a solid week, every time I opened the door, I was hit with the sweetest subtle scent of coffee perfume. That same week, reaching for napkins to sop up the milk he’s been trying to pour into his cereal, my son said, “Sorry for the laminar flow, Mom.” The laminar flow! I have hereby concluded that spilled milk is most assuredly nothing to cry about, but is in fact something to be celebrated.
Mary Oliver was right: joy is not meant to be a crumb. The world is wild and wonderful and waiting for our notice. I’ll be on Instagram every day sharing delights, probably with the hashtags #thejoyreport and #delightoftheday because I can’t decide which one I like better and because abundance feels like something else to celebrate.
And on this point I am wholly convinced: we should celebrate everything we can. I hope you’ll join me, here or there.
The Book Report
-Since I’m only here about once a month, and I’ve got my nose in at least half a dozen books a month, I’ve decided to give them a quick rundown in each post (joy! abundance! specificity!) No affiliate links, just trying to send you in the right direction.
-Meanwhile in San Francisco, Wendy MacNaughton. Illustrations in detail and color so vivid they will warm your heart even if you didn’t spend most of your twenties in the Bay Area. Wendy Mac forever.
-The Missionary Kids, Holly Berkley Fletcher. I was lucky enough to meet Holly at the festival, and her award-winning book (that’s a good story too!) is wise and witty. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
-Dressed Up for a Riot, Michael Idov. This one is making me laugh out loud with lots of Russian inside jokes. An improbable (but true!) romp through the magazine world of Moscow in the 2010s.
-The Place Between Our Pains, KJ Ramsey. This is a stunningly beautiful (and deeply honest and funny) memoir of life with chronic illness and the joy that persists amidst the suffering. Unbelievably, KJ is facing yet more new health challenges as her book is about to launch, and that is so wildly unfair that I want to throw something. But instead I’ll be back soon with an excerpt from her book!
-Enormous Wings, Laurie Frankel. Seventy-seven-year-old woman becomes unexpectedly pregnant. Meditations on life, death, and agency follow. Don’t worry, Laurie Frankel will explain it all (almost finished with this one—no spoilers!)
The Joy Report
-Pope Leo recently said that we should all be reading books and talking to each other about them, and you guys, I am definitely going to get an A on this assignment! I’m also extra glad that our Jesuit Media Lab collection of essays, In Praise Of: Ignatian Letters of Recommendation for the Spiritual Life, is now available in hard copy form.
-Our neighborhood is a veritable garden this time of year, and I could draft several posts full of gasp-worthy plants, but for now, the colors of this geranium are really doing it for me.
-Would you like to read 11,000 words about a quixotic and often funny quest to find America’s best free restaurant bread? I bet you would. This was a joy in our household. God bless Caity Weaver and every piece of bread she ate along the way.
Keeping the joy engine running with you,
Cameron
This is lovely. I'm also so psyched about seeing all the flowers on neighborhood walks this spring. And The Sheep Detectives movie brought some unexpected joy as well.
What?! Robin Wall Kimmerer and Barbara Brown Taylor? What a joy it would be to spend time in their company even as a non-writer! Joy is getting long views of Mt. Rainier coming back from Indianapolis last Sunday. In watching a pair of geese parents and their SEVEN goslings, (an instant large family!) waddle around the garden next door. In the heady scent of lilacs. In the electric orange of a poppy and the deep pink of a peony. I'd share photos but don't see how to do that!