Opinion: Joy is more than a feeling. Listen to what it’s telling you

Opinion by Tess Taylor

(CNN) — There’s a poem from Mary Oliver I’ve been meditating on lately: “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. There are plenty of lives and towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back … better than all the riches and power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. … Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Joy is not made to be a crumb. That’s a sentence I savor — it reminds me that joy is maybe so much bigger than we often let it be. It’s no crumb but the whole pie, the full nutty loaf, the full raucous potluck. Joy might be the meal that sustains us. Noticing joy can be a guiding force, helping us name what matters in our lives. Joy, Oliver suggests, helps us discern what we love, and, just maybe, helps us figure out how we want to live.

In the middle of difficult years, I’ve been so grateful to occasionally have the assignment here to write about joy. It’s been, in some ways, a sidelong project in truly challenging years. Don’t get me wrong: Not all of my writing here has been joyful. Far from it. I’ve covered wildfires, more wildfires, what to do when smoke fills the sky for days.

I’ve written about pandemic unsettlement and school shootings, and my deep sadness — as a kid who was once threatened with a gun in her own school — that we haven’t made the world less dangerous for our kids. And during these difficult years, I’ve grieved plenty — about environmental destruction, racial violence, the specter of eroded civil rights.

But in the middle of that, this space has also offered me a chance to celebrate about the weird, the whimsical, the unexpectedly sustaining. I’ve gotten to write about the delightful attitudes of backyard chickens, the experience of filling a lawn with native plants. I’ve written about the art of unplugging, social media sabbaticals and finding practical ways to connect, re-route, take the long view. I’ve had the chance to write about rest — something which, by nature, is linked to joy. (It is hard to be truly joyful when we are not rested.) In the process I began to think about how windows of both rest and joy might offer some antidote to our culture’s chronic fury: space to reset, process, unplug and forgive.

Most importantly, amid wildfires, epidemics and guns, and alongside the occasional backyard chicken, I’ve also had the chance to write about poetry. I want to be clear: writing about joy, attention and unplugging aren’t separate from writing about poetry. These things interweave. In a fractured, often violent culture, engaging with poetry is also a way to rest, reset and reroute. Poetry is a way — despite all — to notice delight.

Sometimes, writing about poems here at CNN, I felt like a stealth poetry whisperer. But those of you who joined me in this space seemed to savor the whispering. Across chaotic years, you companioned me. When I wrote about fighting down pandemic grief by writing a haiku a day for a year, you all were so enthusiastic about writing your own that some of you undertook another year of haiku writing, sending me verses along the way.

When I wrote about poetry helping soldiers stay humane amid the crises of war and destruction, you sent me poems that you’ve held close to your heart during violent times. You wrote to me about holding these poems because they offer you spaces for the unexpected, spaces for noticing, spaces for holding vulnerability, complexity and contradiction. And I wrote about the fact that poems are places where we can explore what’s unsettled, where we can explore the art of changing our minds.

It’s been a head-spinning political summer. There has been civic violence and gun violence and assassination attempts and intense heat and the sudden retirement of one candidate and the ascent of another. There’s a lot on the line this fall. We all have a lot to talk about. We have big decisions to make. As we do: I wonder if grounding in joy might help us plot a way forward.

I think that’s because joy can be an excellent teacher.  As a teacher of poetry, when I lead a workshop, I ask that my poetry students not begin with critique. It’s always easy to say what you don’t like about something, easy to point out why it might not work.  Instead, when students read each other’s new poems, I ask that each new reader name a delight. We anchor in pleasure — a word or a funny moment, the music of a slant rhyme. Focusing on delight helps a writer to know what to do more of.  It helps a reader find out where their sensibilities lie. We are better off learning to write and imagine towards what delights us than trying to skirt the edges of what might not.

So here’s a final thought: What if we take this out of the writing classroom — or out of the poetry column — and into our lives? As we face down the questions of coming months, what might centering rest, delight, joy and even a bit of poetry bring to the process?

It’s telling, for instance, that one of the signs that Kamala Harris might be an awesome candidate is that right now, she helps us imagine a world where we are happy and happier together. She seems, well, joyful.  As much as I love Harris, (and I really do), the end of this column is not really about her. It’s about the fact that it’s important to  discover our joy.  When we find that joy,  it’s important to savor it.  And it’s  important to let that joy point us toward naming the big dreams about what our lives might feel like.

Perhaps sometimes we find a little space for that in a column about chickens, or in a reminder that it’s really, really okay to rest, or to say no once in a while. And perhaps sometimes we find that by making space to read words that allow us to daydream, breathe, see beauty, reconnect to our bodies and to one another.

Here’s what else: We can hope that out of that space there’s more space.

Hopefully we find room for less fury, more hip hop; less negativity, more laughter;  more freedom to explore and wonder; more space to see the dignity in ourselves and one another; more space to know in our bones that our diversity makes us stronger. Maybe that’s partly what our conversation has been about — to keep proposing, even in these harrowing years, that we have space to dream, and that we can work towards repair; that there is, even now, a future where we can delight in one another, where we can savor both art and our lives.

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