Summer Reflections

 

This week marks the midpoint of this year; we are halfway through 2024.  Insert confetti being thrown here.  This is also a good week to reflect on the past 182 days.  How is the art project of your life going?  What images, events, experiences, thoughts, emotions are settling into your soul?  What has filled the past 4,368 hours?  What is bringing you joy right now?  When has delight danced in your soul and caused goosebumps to race/run up and down your spine?  Too often, for me, it feels like the scriptwriters for my life are Eeyore and Grumpy Dwarf with a bit of the Incredible Hulk mixed in for fun.  How do we hold the tension that there is suffering and struggling without letting that be the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  How does joy, laughter, and song become teachers where we can sit in their classrooms too?  Ross Gay spent an entire year writing essays about what he saw in the world that delighted him.  I encourage you to look up some of Ross’ work.  Here is a quote from The Book of Delights:

 

“I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

 

Ponder what delights have you shared with others so far this year?  When?  Who shared that delight with you?  Who joined you in the chorus of laughter or singing or silent awe as you watched the sunset?  What moments strangely warmed your heart and stirred your soul?

 

Gay goes on to say in an interview with Krista Tippett: “Joy is the labor that will make the life that I want possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”

 

What stirs in response to this quote?

 

Finally, hear how Gay can hold the beautiful and broken together in this essay from The Book of Delights:

 

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be, she said: ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.  “And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

“Is sorrow the true wild?

“And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

“For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

“What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

“I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

 

May your sorrow in the swampy wilderness of the world today meet a companion that together you might discover joy for the remaining days of 2024.  Amen.