Ode to Joy
The theme for last night’s UU Connections meeting was “Opening to Joy.” The topic sounded straightforward, but I had an unexpectedly complex, confusing, and even downhearted reaction to the subject materials.
I consider myself a generally happy person. But joy and happiness are different: happiness is a warm ember; joy is a leaping flame. The ember keeps me warm, but the readings stressed that the (at least occasional) flame is important too. When I turned my attention to my experience of joy, I realized that while I do have flares of joy at times, these days they tend to be accompanied, and almost instantaneously doused, by pangs of sorrow. (It hasn’t always been this way.) Bursts of joy flare at moments when I’m with Dyke, but they’re accompanied by an awareness that we are mortal, transitory—that one of us will likely lose the other before being, in our turn, lost to the world. Joy leaps in me when Dan is really pleased by something, and the more pleased he is, the sharper the joy. But it’s tempered by the knowledge that his life is always damned difficult—that he’s continuously enmeshed in some degree of frustration, anger, humiliation, or pain, sometimes all simultaneously. Joy finds me at times when I regard the routinely exquisite beauty of the world—a leaf, a flower, a deer, a star—but I’m simultaneously crushed by what is happening in this singular place, and to everything and everyone in it, as a result of human insatiability, love of comfort, ignorance, and obstinance (my own included). Every experience of joy I‘ve had in recent memory is at least nearly as painful as it is pleasant. I live in a double-edged world, and both edges are keen.
The materials in the group’s package this month includes a video, “My Joy is Heavy,” created by the Bengsons, a married musical duo. The idea of “heavy joy” is that we can experience joy even while sorrowing, that joy and sadness need not be exclusionary, and burdens need not crush joy. In their song “Underground,” they offer a poetic description of this phenomenon:
When you live underground
There are stars
But they shine
On the underside of roots
Tap roots going down
Make a constellation if you look around
Underground . . .
There is light down here once your eyes adjust
There is light down here
The shadows I see are not as dark as those that the Bengsons describe. I don’t live underground, but it visits me from time to time. And these lyrics offer a way for me to view joy through Dan’s experience. There is light in Dan’s world because his eyes have adjusted. He sees the stars and the constellations they make, not because they dispel the darkness but because they shine through it. And the spark is no less joyful because of the darkness it emerges from.
I need to mindfully cultivate an openness to joy, however hard, in my own life. Joy is not zero-sum. It isn’t—or need not be—cancelled out by sorrow or vexation or fear or pain. For me, at least lately, I’ve allowed angst to counterbalance joy. What if I were to focus on joy for the moments that it flares?
What if I just adjust my eyes?
What if it just takes practice?