I have been all over the place this month. Instead of pretending otherwise, I’m going to be honest and give you a smorgasbord of thoughts, links, and recommendations. The through line is my spiritual practice of noticing where the joy comes in (shout out to my high school english teacher who made me think “the joy comes before the ‘in'” and apologies to him for the less than great grammar).
The joy of understanding what is enough
The human struggle was for so long organized around figuring out how to have enough and now that so many of us do, we are still negotiating with what enough means. There’s a story about a grade school teacher whose students produced some of the best artwork in the school, despite that not being her subject area specialty. When asked how she did it, she said she didn’t tell them what to do but she did help them realize when to stop. When it was enough. I’ve had these lines from this Indigo Girls song in my head a lot recently and they always make me pause: “Well, darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable / And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.”
The insatiable hunger of darkness takes many forms, but these days for me it’s evident in my relationship with consuming information online. Consuming the information “of the day” will fill my life now that it doesn’t end when I finish the back of the newspaper. I have to engage in the discipline of enough. This is tricky because I can’t do it perfectly. Some days there is the joy of feeling like I hit the mark; other days I feel like I made myself crazy, despairing, and overstuffed by consuming too much. Oliver Burkeman’s work, for example his post The news ≠ your life, and a huge dose of self-compassion help. Self-compassion is so important here. If I’m a gross POS who screws up constantly then I might as well consume too much again the next day because who cares. If I’m loving and loved, good and whole yet fallible, then maybe I’ll try again to hit the mark of enough the very next moment that I have a chance.
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The joy of a daily spiritual practice
If you would like to experience the joy of a daily spiritual practice but struggle with consistency, I have a couple of books that might help. Fragments of Your Ancient Name: 365 Glimpses of the Divine for Daily Meditation by Joyce Rupp is one of my current favorites. The book is a daybook of conceptions of God. Here’s the entry from September 16th so you can get an idea of what it’s like:
Mother of Mystery
by Edward Hays
When life does not readily supply
What I anticipate or think I need,
When the response of others
Fails to meet my expectations,
When the peaceful world I long for
Remains caught in self destruction,
Take me into your welcoming arms
And teach me again about mystery.
Remind me to place in your care
What I cannot manage or change.
Today: The Mother of Mystery holds my concerns.
I am always better off starting my day with a passage like this rather than a quick doomscroll before I do what it takes to get all of us out the door by 7:27. The other book I’d recommend that follows the same daily format is The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have by Mark Nepo. Each entry is about a page, so a bit too long to quote fully here. But, for instance, the September 22 entry is titled “Facing Sacred Moments” and begins with a quote from Abraham Heschel: “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”
Nepo goes on to say, “Maybe it’s part of being American, this want to build on things instead of facing them…But now that there’s nowhere left to go, a different sense of exploration…is calling. Instead of building a road to somewhere other than where we are, the life of the spirit requires us to open doors that wait before us and within us.” A daily spiritual practice involves meeting myself where I am, over and over. It is joyful and tedious and not always as quick of a fix as some of the other junky habits that call to me. And yet I try because there is nothing that sustains me like it.
Although it’s a decade older than hers, this car reminds me of my sweet aunt Lynn. Stupid joy is everywhere.
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The joy of being here today
Every fall, I return to two pieces of writing that make me weep. Broadly, they speak my deeply bittersweet dialect and express my heart’s view of parenting, but most of all they catapult me directly into massive gratitude for this ordinary-joy-filled, messily gorgeous day. This one is a father’s piece on dropping his last child off at college (it’s so, so good. Please don’t miss it!). The one other is from a family’s twitter thread, written by a father about his daughter Sarah Pitts who died when she was hit by a bus while serving as a bike marshal:
Despite all the other things I do – the complaining, the worrying, the buying, the thinking, the striving, the imagining – these two pieces help me remember that I already know the secret. Life is more precious, more fleeting, and more simple than I pretend it is. “Simple?” I know it doesn’t feel simple, but I get back to this question: do I love people more, or do I love my ideas about things more? There’s a simplicity to doing the work in front of you (joyful love) and being humble about your thoughts.
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The joy of spooky season
We’re embarking on spooky season, the best!!!, and if you haven’t seen “Get Out,” the 2017 psychological horror comedy by Jordan Peele (or haven’t rewatched it), you must. Here’s a link to my favorite scary movie podcast episode recapping the film (I know that sounds strange but it’s the most fun podcast I listen to each week). A friend sent jazz poet and author Gil Scott-Heron’s words, which immediately made me think about “Get Out” again, as we continue to debate who a Real American is. (This month I’ll also be reading Ira Levine’s Rosemary’s Baby and watching the film adaptation of his The Stepford Wives, as well as learning to play, terribly and joyfully, Vince Guaraldi’s “The Great Pumpkin Waltz” on piano, apologies to my piano teacher Rita and my family).
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The joy of being in it together
Finally, I leave you with a snapshot from the International African American Museum my family and I visited when we were in Charleston, South Carolina. We’re all we got but we’re all we need. I love you. Tell me stuff, too!
