Let Joy Chose You…
I needed this poem, when my wise friend Amanda sent it to me on December 11th. I would need it more each day after.
Joy Chose You
Donna Ashworth from her book Wild Hope: Healing Words to Find Light on Dark Days
Joy does not arrive with a fan fair
on a red carpet strewn
with flowers of a perfect life
joy sneaks in
as you pour a cup of coffee
watching the sun
hit your favorite tree
just right
and you usher joy away
because you are not ready for her
your house is not as it should be
for such a distinguished guest
but joy, you see
cares nothing for your messy home
or your bank balance
or your waistline
joy is supposed to slither through
the cracks of your imperfect life
that’s how joy works
you cannot truly invite her
you can only be ready
when she appears
and hug her with meaning
because in this very moment
joy chose you.
I had spent the last few weeks busily “preparing” for this joy-filled season yet somehow missed Joy trying to wriggle in. The road blocks were the usual suspects, things conceived with joy and her cousin delight in mind, but taken over by the spirit of perfectionism and its cousin duty. Decorating my home and running errands for my favorite holiday tradition, a solstice dinner party with dear friends, preparing for the perfect holiday road trip to Santa Fe - where we pack all the right things to snack and enjoy, year-end work with clients, gifts to family, clients, and friends near and far, and various holiday get-togethers and events.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that by the time our guests arrived on Solstice night my brain was so full that joy struggled mightily to inch her way into my awareness.
It turns out, I am a limited human being and not a constantly executing machine. A limited AND aging human, thus even more limited. I come from German, Polish and French ancestors. With that DNA comes a stubborn quality that kept me doubling down on willfully resisting these limitations. As a result, I ushered Joy away often this month. I didn’t have time to sit and receive her, because I needed to prepare for her!
AND YES, I can see exactly how crazy this sounds putting it on paper, but at the time, it seemed so rational. I ran around, bought, decorated, and prepared for JOY! And in doing so, I missed her tiptoeing in. Only in reading this poem and writing this post (after all the planning and preparation) is it obvious to me that Joy lives in making contact with the present. She resides in the ordinary and mundane. And like the poet claims when she says, ”I cannot truly invite her (Joy) in, I can only be ready for her when she appears and hug her close because in this very moment, Joy chose me.” My job was to be ready, NOT perfect with an empty To Do list. Only with an internal stillness and some awareness beyond that endless list, could Joy have found me.
Ironically, all of 2023 the whiteboard/design board in my office has had written on it in bold letters:
JUST MAKE CONTACT
It is true that we teach best what we most need to learn. Joy needs me to “just make contact” with this moment, AND I desperately need that same contact. I need to touch with the world of sensory material and motion. The world that exists outside my brain and beyond my lists and plans. It insists on my attention, and requires me to make contact in order for me to experience it. And without that attention and contact how can Joy possibly find me?
…joy sneaks in
as you pour a cup of coffee
watching the sun
hit your favorite tree
just right…
If you are feeling a bit estranged from even minor Joys in your life at times, as I have been often this year, it may not be about us. I wonder if contemporary life is less hospitable to joy? If true, maybe this poem offers a remedy we might use to feel more at home in our experience of living. The siren song of “performing” our lives, living up to some standard, internal or external may actually take us farther from the experience of living our lives. The poet, Naomi Shihab Nye once urged us to live so poems can find us. This poem suggests we live so Joy might find us.
As we collectively imagine “beginning again” at the approach of a new year, together let’s consider finding our unique way of living, so Joy (and poems) might find us. May we all make contact more often with our experience of the ordinary moments, even the tedious ones. And hold each one worthwhile and singular, just as we do our ideas of the extraordinary and the perfect.
May it be so.
Nancy
For those of you looking for a practice to notice and receive the ordinary joys in your present life, feel free to contact me directly at https://www.nancywonders.com/contact
Also you can check out the 15-minute video by Rick Hanson called Taking in the Good, which has a one minute practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA3EGx46r4Q