How to Joy
Photo by @dtait_photography
If you’re like me, you feel like you’re swimming in an emotional soup, being lifted on crests of golden broth, then borne down again, snagged on some indistinct leafy green. It’s confusing and strange, and it has me on the verge of tears most days. Yesterday my family (me, my husband Dwaine, our two grown sons, and our older son’s partner) were out on the water, taking turns playing with Dwaine’s new toy: a wing foil setup. We walked down from our home and set off from the boathouse at the bottom of our road. Those of us not foiling (or rather boarding—we’re still learning how to get up on the foil) could walk along the harbour and watch, calling out to the rider little encouragements and corrections. The sun was warm on our faces, though the season has turned to autumn and the temperatures are dropping. The light on the water was alive and glittering, and I noticed that the hills rising above the harbour, which is nestled between the mainland and peninsula, give the sky the shape of a giant god’s eye.
Standing there in my wetsuit on the path next to the water, dripping wet but warm from my efforts, I couldn’t help but feel humbled and grateful. It’s hard to believe we made it here sometimes—all of us. Where life feels kind of normal, and we are relatively free to move and enjoy our environs. The feeling I had yesterday can only be described as utter contentment. But there is also a very intense winding of my inner coils. A spring-like dis-ease that is nearly imperceptible except that it manifests itself in my body. The simultaneity of these conflicting sensations may be the most disconcerting part.
I have of late returned to an old habit of tension where I bite on the sides of my tongue. It’s kind of disgusting really and totally neurotic. It’s obsessive and subconscious, and even as I notice I’m doing it and attempt to relax my jaw and take a deep breath, it begins again. I cast about, looking for the source of this anxiety, but it’s buried so deeply that I can’t at first discern it. On the surface of my own life, there is calm. Peacefulness even. A happy recognition that at least in this moment, all is well. So what is causing me to feel like I might actually implode?
On Sunday I had a Zoom meet-up with three of my dearest friends in the world. We are spread across the globe in New Zealand, Vermont, Scotland, and Hawaii. These women, I have decided, must be a part of my soul family, because the way we support each other is like that—epic and total in each of our lives. We span over 30 years in age, and ethnically, we nearly cover the gamut. Our shared experience of working in a little school in the Swiss Alps many years ago links us; there we began a meditation circle…the four of us met every Tuesday evening for an hour, sometimes two. It was a delicious time of learning and growing into our spiritual selves, and we have nurtured those selves and each other for these many years since. Again after that Zoom meeting, I felt awash in gratitude and unafraid about what comes next, even though there are many unknowns. So why can’t I just be in that? Exist in the space where it feels like love wraps around me and where the decisions I have made buoy me up, along with my whānau?
Dwaine says I should cut out the social media. It is there that I am apprised daily of each new case where an unarmed African American man/woman/child is shot and killed by a police officer in the U.S. It is there where the reality-check I used to share with my U.S. History students is playing out with alarming accuracy. I used to teach in a wealthy prep school in the High Rockies, a little pocket of American privilege where whiteness is the norm and teachers are appreciated but treated like beloved house servants more than anything else. There I would teach about how America has never been “great” if you were a woman or a minority, and certainly not if you were poor. And I would teach about the bubbling morass of racial tension that is brewing beyond the lovely vistas of the “American dream” narrative. I remember saying, before Trump was elected, that I couldn’t imagine what it might be that could tip the scales, but that I believed civil war was not out of the question. The students looked at me like I was crazy. Wild brown lady teaching liberal craziness to the wrong crowd. And then it began…
Of course it didn’t begin with Trump. It was always there. What I mean is the unraveling. That’s what began. The unraveling of the tight corset that was containing America’s nasty rolls of elitist, classist, racist, xenophobic sentiment. That it was predictable is of no comfort. My mom and dad live there. My brother and his beautiful family. Dwaine’s family and so many of our friends. The metaphor for us emigrating can’t be jumping a sinking ship, because I can’t have that ship sinking and quite frankly, neither can the rest of the world. For all its contradictions, the U.S. is a kind of rock upon which we depend. Economically. Politically. Even socially. The world can handle a hiccup. One ridiculous president in a long line of contradictory and questionable but at least sensible-sounding ones. But America unraveling? Its seams coming undone and letting spill its unruly corpus of lies and corruption and, quite frankly, hate? We don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know what to do with that. It’s not like I thought it would truly right itself…not in my lifetime. I mean, I left after all. And how can I even consider just shutting it out? Turning a blind eye? What do I owe my self? And what do I owe the world? I always come back to the fact that I am, in every legitimate sense of the word, serving my community. The one in which I live now and which has embraced me with kindness. Here in New Zealand, I give myself every day to youth who have been abandoned by almost everyone; I teach them, though they don’t and can’t begin to see the value of what I am offering them. They are not shy about expressing this either. But you all know about this.
My resolve is to just keep doing the best that I can because it is all I have and therefore enough. I haven’t abandoned that belief. But it doesn’t always convince the emotional body. I can feel even in my physical body that not all of my layers are talking to each other. While I can assess and make sense of things on an intellectual level, there are still my emotional self, my physical body, to convince. And I write this one anticipating the closure, a crescendo that might be reached as has happened in so many of my blog posts. They just arrive, and I feel a sense of relief as, I know, my readers do. Yes, it is all worthwhile. There is meaning here, even if I have to create it myself. We’re going to be okay.
As I sift through it all, there is, first and foremost, the leaving. The simple fact that I have left America for good. Not that I’ll never go back there, but I will never live there again. And for that I must turn to James Baldwin, whose discourse often offers up the answers to my questions. Here is what he says on the subject: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it… If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.”
Yes, that’s a truth that calms the swishing a bit; I throw an arm up over the top of a floating crust of bread and consider. I have chosen to live apart from my roots. That is a very straightforward fact. I’m able to draw in a stuttering breath. Even to say it has a calming effect. I do love America. It is where my roots are. Leaving doesn’t negate that, nor does it mean I won’t continue to struggle with the ways America disappoints me. Okay. Okay. I can be here, where my heart and my children have chosen to be, and I can love the place and people that grew me. These are not mutually exclusive sentiments.
I can keep writing and I can keep living. There is guilt, yes. But there was also guilt when I was living in California. Or Colorado or Vermont. And that guilt was even more absurd, because it grew out of something that was completely arbitrary: the fact that I was not and never would be a black man or woman. Straight up. I typically never feared the cops. I didn’t anticipate, upon being pulled over, being abused or even murdered. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. But whether or not my sense of safety was reflective of the reality, it did exist. And I functioned according to it. And yes, that is privilege. I suppose it is impossible to escape the guilt completely.
E.M. Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I quote him often because the question is so resonant, and I will sometimes add, “Indeed, and how do I know what I feel until I see what I say?” Admittedly, I am hoping for an answer as I type. I know what my feeling looks like: my face screwed up as I bite on the side of my tongue (very unattractive), tears, deer-in-headlights stillness. What I don’t know is how to define it. I suspect it has to do with the leaving. And with the uncertainty of my older son’s situation (loving a California girl who is currently on a 6-month visa to New Zealand). The way Covid seems to have forever altered the global landscape and our pathways along it. How as each problem is confronted a new one arises. People who refuse to take the vaccine (how can I be sure they’re wrong?), difficulties and delays in rolling out vaccinations, heightened racial tensions and greater socio-economic disparities. Yeah, as I type these things, my heart in my chest contracts. There it is again. I can’t deny it.
And I also can’t watch any more body-cam footage of people dying. There’s got to be a middle ground between hiding your head in the sand and over-exposing yourself to content that does nothing but send your heart skittering off its pace. Sit down and write, Kim. Sending your words and your truth into the world can be done from anywhere. And keep teaching those whom love has abandoned. Those kids need you. This is the injunction I breathe into my own living. But it can be tailored to just about anyone’s life. Keep making beautiful cakes that light up people’s special occasions and make them smile. Keep taking soil samples for study in the lab, so that we can better understand the impact of our practices on the earth and its water. Keep designing buildings for people to live in and in which they may conduct their businesses. Keep selling your vegetables at the farmers market, so that the people of your town can be nourished by the food you grow. Keep doing stand-up, so that the people will see the humour in what breaks them. So that we can all laugh and stay alive through the hurting.
What I’ve found is that one of the most important things to guard in this life is joy. It will not remove the grief. Of course it won’t. But there is always someone grieving while another is celebrating. There is always someone thanking god for a small miracle, while another is lamenting a loss. Thank goodness. That is what life is like. Like in Bruegel’s painting of The Fall of Icarus, which has already been written about more beautifully than I will ever write anything, by W.H. Auden himself (in his poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts”). Auden said, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In Bruegel’s painting, a scene is presented—a farmer plodding along, plowing his field behind a horse; a tall ship on the sea, sails full of air; a village shimmering in the distance. And there, almost ‘out of frame”: a pair of white legs disappearing into the ocean, the last glimpse of Icarus, having tumbled from the sky with his homemade wings aflame.
I can’t live all of the stories at once. And I certainly can’t suffer for them all. That would be the end of me (and my tongue). I am not a lawmaker, but I can push for change in my writing. Perhaps the lawmakers will heed the call of the artists and historians to shift policy. I can also contribute to the collective joy that must exist in the world if we are all to stay afloat on this chaotic bisque. If my actions are contributing to the general joy and not detracting from it, then I’m going to call it good. That is my best, and I give it willingly. What is your best? It’s not a challenge. I’m certainly in no position to challenge anyone. It’s an invitation…to realise what you can do (instead of fighting, fleeing, or freezing, as is our wont in situations this frightening). In the meantime, I’m leaving social media for a bit. I will still post the links to my blogposts, because I know that’s where most of my readers come from. But no more scrolling. My heart is too heavy. My inner springs wound up too tight.
May we find the ways to create and spread joy. May we know joy in our own lives. And may we protect the joy of others with our love, our conviction, and most of all, our actions.
Wing foiling. This isn’t one of us (haha), but here it is in case you were wondering. : )
