Wallowing in Joy

 Or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply 

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music 

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, 

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest/ 

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. 

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

                                                                                                   T.S. Eliot
                                                           "Dry Salvages" from Four Quartets


Summer afternoons find me processing local bounty; the peach-peeling of my previous post yields to poblano-picking today. The task is highly satisfying, as the shiny green-black peppers pop off the plant easily with a healthy, firm-hollow "shunk!" I'm harvesting in anticipation for a poblano taquito recipe I'll be making later, one I spied in the special "MEXICO!" edition of Food & Wine (my parents' subscription, not mine. It led me to poblano taquitos, however, so I can't pretend to judge today. ) As so often happens when collecting for a recipe from memory, I had the sneaking suspicion I would either largely overshoot, or greatly underestimate, the recipe requirements for poblanos. Feeling cautious, I went for a hearty seven. And so it goes:  I only need one.

Poblanos, anyone?

In addition to the emerald-like pepper-gems glistening among the leaves, I also snagged two heirloom tomatoes. These are the heaving, bulging breed, with rippling rolls of flesh that warp around the stems to create a caricature of a tomato. There are smoothly round and perfectly demure tomatoes, and then there are these monsters:  all manner of ostentatious, full of themselves, completely engorged with goodness. Their preening display is at once over the top, and completely undeniable.  I ended up picking two the size of my head. Tomato sandwiches for days, and days, without a single complaint.

I have to remind myself that these are the glory days of Virginia summer. I don't want to miss a second of this vegetal opulence and muggy jungle heat. It's got nothing to do with a dislike other seasons--I am not squirrelishly stuffing my cheeks to last through the long winter. No, I just can't deny myself the reveling and relishing of so much temporal abundance. It would be wrong, not to swim and skip and stuff my face with all the tomatoes, especially when the season only lasts so long. In the Shenandoah valley we careen from one glory to another, beginning with cherry blossoms and rhubarb, then on through a roller coaster of delights:  lilacs and strawberries, tiger-lilies and peaches, sunflowers and tomatoes. I love it all with a fierce tenderness that is uncontainable--why stopper the squeals of delight over a burgeoning sunflower head, packed tight with seeds?--and the nostalgia in me even loves that none of it stays. For that, I almost love it all the more. I can't keep it.

There is a part of me that acknowledges that none of this wistful seasonal wondering is new. Scores of writers and artists have attempted to capture the fragmented essence of nature. Even in their small, interpreted pieces of Incarnation, I never fail to sense a throb of the heart, a yearning and aching on some primitive, elemental level. Part of me wildly wishes I was in the flock of geese that pressed Mary Oliver to write poems, or embedded in the mountain rock of Annie Dillard's soliloquies.

So while I know it's nothing new--my mental wanderings on the subject--I also know how personally necessary it is, to write, to lament, to declare, to fall down on my knees and drop a poem from my mouth like a river stone. I feel compelled to tell someone, anyone, how the mist rose off the mountain stream today, the way the hot sun broke through the clouds and melded with the surface of the icy tumbling water to create a breathtaking cottony cast between the trees. That mist. It was like I walked into an exquisite secret that I had no business seeing and no way of keeping.

I've been thinking a lot lately, on this drive to write and what stands in its way. What I remember first and always is the feeling I had as a late teenager, into my early twenties, when I knew writing was for me. I had the feeling for it then:  the thrill of slogging and straining through so much mess to find myself in a mental clearing where words feel like second nature, and my mind could flow straight into my fingertips. It didn't matter how halting my initial steps were, or how god-awful some of my first drafts were--I always knew I would eventually spy a strand of gold, and finely weave it to bring myself eventually back to that clarity, that hush, that sense of "yes. This." Writing was my homecoming, my internal rhythm, the place I knew myself the least and the best.

I miss that feeling often, and most particularly when I feel stifled or incapable of expressing what I wish to, for lack of practice and rusted gears. I also miss it when I find myself afraid and self-censoring. Honestly? The older I get, the more I feel like a nameless fear has risen in me. That special fear, which leads to safety-seeking, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to control and squeezing tight of all creative, life-giving impulses. These days, as fear so often clamors for my attention, I find myself fighting to believe in joy, to capture it, to wallow in it. For one reason or another--reasons I know, but that we don't have to dive into here--joy became evasive to me, like quicksilver, untrustworthy. Without adding any blame, I have to say, I've developed quite the habit in my late twenties of choosing security over spontaneity; comfort over growth; fear over joy. This happened subtly, yet repeatedly, to the point that it became ingrained in me before I even knew what was happening.

It's so bone-sad to feel like joy is a stranger. On some subterranean level, it's something that even brings me shame. I mean, what kind of a person doesn't know how to create their own joy? (The internal shame-voice asks.) But you know, I think we live in a pretty confusing time where plenty of people feel divorced from joy in one way or another. True joy, wildly tender and terrifyingly vulnerable joy. That joy. When was the last time you felt it? If recently, oh, thank goodness. Can you tell me about it sometime? And if not, then I'm right there with you. I have a hard time with it too. But you know, rather than making this a topic of shame or regret, what if we saw it as this:  we get to meet joy anew, as if for the first time. Joy is a stranger, full of potential and possibility. What if you were greeting your joy for the first time? What would it say to you, and how would you respond?

As usual, I'm slightly terrified writing this, which I could take as an indicator to A) delete everything and forget about writing a blog in the first place, or B) embrace the beginnings of joy that lie nascent here, the struggle within this blog to express something BIG and FINE and HONEST (I had a wonderful painting professor once who said this, and it's stuck with me since.)

I hope you find joy today, in your garden or a mountain stream or within your own fine mind. Seek it, see it, treasure it, wallow in it. We all need you stinking of your own joy, so that we can remember how much we deserve to find it, too.

With love,
A