What has brought you joy lately?

We all need a blessing now and then...

If you don’t know about our Juke contributor smorgasbords, let me explain. Every three months, I send out a question to each of our contributors and then I publish all their replies in one big piece. The last one was What’s Inspiring You Lately? in October.

This time the question is, “What has brought you joy lately?”

It's an interesting conundrum to me that only the bad feelings seem like they will last forever. Your grief, your pain, your fear. Even boredom seems interminable. Why isn’t there a door out of the room of awful feelings? Or a window you can open? A frightened mind doesn’t know that fear ends. A grieving mind can't imagine that grief ends. How long will it last? Who knows, maybe forever. It always feels like it will be forever.

Joy, on the other hand, is all windows and doors. Somehow that's a part of its magic. An integral puzzle piece to the experience of joy—its entire breathless quality—is the voice that tells you hold on to this even as you know you can't possibly hold on. It's the voice (your own voice) saying remember this even as you feel your attention drawn away. Joy is, by its very nature, fleeting.

It is the emotion of an instant. And yet somehow not despite of, but rather because of its extraordinary lightness, joy can sustain an entire human life. Isn't that something?

So today, smack in the middle of January, in the depths of winter, with the grief of devastating fires raging out west and with ominous signals all around, I'd like to catch a few moments of that lightness on Juke.

We're talking today, just briefly, about joy.

I’ll start…

Tonya Morton:

The thing with little joys—the surprising, instantaneous ones—is that I tend to forget them after they’ve happened. But I am trying to do a better job of taking note.

Here are a few recent joys…

• The quality of sunlight through a little piece of raw citrine on the windowsill.

• The faint smell of cigar smoke in the car for a few minutes after we pass an old man smoking on the sidewalk in Brooklyn.

• A woman walking down Hudson Street in a big, fluffy neon pink hat.

• A vase of sunflowers on the kitchen counter.

• Among the grinding and whirring of the construction outside our window, the occasional quiet singing of one of the workers.

• The discovery of a tucked-away Catholic church I’d never seen before on 71st Street, dark and gothic inside, filled with candles, smelling of incense.

• Santo, the dog, snoring lightly next to me on the couch.

• The arrival of a cinnamon Dong Phuong king cake, shipped north from New Orleans for Epiphany.

• The secret dimples in Paul’s cheeks, which only show up when he’s really, truly, smiling.

• The sight of the skyline over the East River last night as we drove over the Williamsburg Bridge. The southern tip of the city clarified in the winter air. Somehow the whole “right exactly now” of my life hit me at that moment—with Paul driving the car and Santo curled up in his backseat bed and the lights of the buildings reflected in the water. I realized, looking out from the passenger seat, I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted or needed from the world. Not one thing. Just to be right here, where it’s warm, looking out.

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Ned Mudd:

Joy? Organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, fair trade, non-toxic, non-industrial, non-political, wrapper-free, high caloric, home made chocolate chip cookies with tea and glitch-beat hip hop.

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Paul Vlachos:

• Friends

• Family

• Loved ones

• Dogs and Cats

• Music

• Food

• Water

• Walking

• The city

• The desert

• The woods

• The ocean

• Reading books

• Hot springs

• Quiet

• Making things

• Naps

• Driving

• Biking

• Walking

• Random conversations

• Roadside quesadillas

• Shooting and editing photos

• Writing

• Playing guitar

• The moment

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Matt Layne:

Me, I am a chaser of joy; I often find it in a meal shared with friends, or when I'm in the delicate and delightful flow of a piece of writing, or laughing, laughing, laughing at something nonsensical with those I love. My most recent moment of joy, as of this writing, was found while participating in a reading with three other poets hours before Alabama's big snowstorm. Alabama's poet laureate, Ashley M. Jones, was in the middle of reading a beautiful and poignant piece of her poetry when a member of the audience sneezed. Without missing a beat in her rhythm, Ashley blessed her, and sweet joy washed over me. We all need a blessing now and then, and for one to occur mid-poem, well, that was joy for me. This world is so often filled with horrors. I'll take my joy wherever I can find it, and I'll ask for seconds, too.

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Sue Cauhape:

That's a very good question. I try to find the positive in things while not becoming a Pollyanna, but finding joy lately is a challenge. In fact, I've tried three times write this post, but it all sounds like a morass. Here's goes anyway:

Joy is inhaling a deep breath without wheezing or coughing.

Joy is realizing I haven't experienced chronic pain for quite a while.

Joy is when I wrench myself out of my chair and sit outside in the afternoon sunshine.

Joy when the birds visit the feeders, calling out to others: it's safe now. When a flock of wrens swarm without fear on the suet cake just over my head, that's joy!

Joy is when my three-year-old grandson and I communicate clearly enough to solve a problem that bothers him, especially when his discomfort is because of something I do.

Joy is when I enjoy a friendly encounter at the store: a smile to a sullen shopper, getting help with something on the top shelf, or even a comical chat with someone over the last bag of flour. It always lifts my spirits.

Joy is having the same waiter at our favorite restaurants. We don't even know each others' names, but there's joy in that continuity, especially in a small town that's becoming more anonamous.

Joy is when playing one of my piano pieces makes my sternum vibrate right over my heart.

Joy is listening to the knitting ladies tell their stories and laughing, feeling the healing that takes place, sharing their latest projects and watching the light in their eyes when we all ooooh and aaaaah over the beauty of their work.

Joy is driving into the desert countryside where the sky reaches into forever and anything that bothered me while cooped up in the house is released to the empty landscape.

Joy is that jolt of adrenalin when I post a story on Substack. It sparks my energy and gives me hope that I'm contributing something useful for someone else.

Joy is revisiting work I've posted and the memories they all record.

Joy is conversations with fellow Substackers, reading their stories, seeing their artwork and photos, sharing bits of their lives they reveal.

It's all about connection, isn't it? I love my solitude more and more as I age, but isolation foments fear and delusion. I need some sort of connection to feel joy, be it with people, animals, or with my creativity.

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Charlie Pepiton:

You asked what brings joy lately. It occurred to me that you didn’t ask about happiness or delight or amusement. I stopped to think about that. Joy has a richness the others lack. Admittedly, we can sap the heat of it with too much thinking. Still, there is more subtlety to joy and more heft. Joy is a darker honey than it is sugar, less cloying but also less abundant. Joy is a guttering candle. Consider how we speak of joy mostly in the darker seasons. We celebrate a birth that impends a death and a return to the light at precisely the darkest hour. Joy has necessary shadows.

This winter has been especially grey in the Inland Northwest. We were promised a La Niña system with more snow. In these darker latitudes, when sunset comes at 4, snow means more light. When we moved to Spokane 10 years ago, there were winters that kept our neighborhood in the city snowpacked for months, but as the Seattle Times noted the other day La Niña, so far, has been La Nada, at least in the valleys. Still, the skiing has been good.

Nordic skiing is new to me. I’ve been a skier from the age of 5, but anymore, I find more joy in heading out cross-country than in bailing out of a ski lift. I enjoy the grind of it and the way even a subtle downhill feels earned. And when the sky over Spokane rarely varies from a flattened haze, you can find flashes of directional light, if not actual clarity, on the mountain. It’s only 45 minutes away. Last Saturday, I climbed to the top of a trail called Eagle’s Crest through 4 inches of fresh powder. The run itself is just over a mile in length with rise and fall in equal measure. It tops out at one of the highest points in the area. Somehow, at 11am, I had first tracks. Only a hare had been ahead of me at the saddle. Everything had that overstuffed look that comes with new snowfall. And the haze parted abruptly. The fog blew out in a tangible drift, and I saw the ball of the sun for the first time in weeks. I stood there squinting for maybe 2 minutes before the next wave moved in. I heard later from a friend that blue sky, actual blue, had cut through for a full 20 minutes. He had to prove it with a photo, but by then, we were navigating a grocery store parking lot under spitting rain. I thought of those rabbit tracks and, as the poet says, “the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.”

photo by Charlie Pepiton

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Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton:

Joy is sliding around on ice with brief glimmers of grace. 
Joy is catching snowflakes in your eyelashes. 
Joy is skiing on fresh powder at sunrise. 
Joy is snow forts lined with firewood. 
Joy is chai on the trail.
Joy is passing a smiling stranger. 
Joy is a satsuma after a long ski.

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Tabby Ivy:

I hate to be a bummer here, but “joy”?

Perhaps it’s just Holiday overload but the thought of trying to come up with something joyful right now kind of left me joyless. Sorry Tonya.

However, I did give it a try and while joy might not be in my reach these days, wonder is. And gratitude.

So, let’s go with those.

On Christmas Eve morning I took a quick run into McMinnville, the next closest town to where I live in Carlton, Oregon. Carlton has no grocery store, so I was going in for some last minute ingredients for the lasagne I was making for Christmas Day with family. It was early, around 7:30am, a cold cloudy morning. Low fog hung like patchwork in the valley, tucking into draws between the hills not quite making it to the top of the tallest trees.

I do love the short ten minute drive between Carlton and McMinnville. Rolling hills, farmland, hazelnut groves and vineyards fill the landscape. “Bucolic” comes to mind. It is lovely most any time of day or season, but on this Christmas Eve morning, at this moment with carols playing on the radio, the sun decided to peek through a break in the clouds to illuminate the fog in the most magical way. There was a glow, a subtle brightness that was very isolated. It provided just enough light to change the color of the trees it touched, contrasting with the muted tones of the fog-covered landscape. “Oh my!”, I thought. Was I joyful? Maybe. Was I in awe? Definitely. But what I truly felt at that moment was wonder. I felt blessed to witness this very transient moment of Nature’s beauty in its glory.

I stopped to take a photo, but, by the time I got my phone out the scene had changed; the fog dispersed and the clouds closed to block the sun. The magic was gone.

What I was left with was gratitude. I felt gratitude for being there to witness this very brief but glorious happening.

Oh the joy of it all! (Did I just say that?)

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Anthony Head:

Having written a book. (Which is—and I'm not spilling any secrets here—much different than writing a book.)

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Fran Gardner:

I am finding incredible joy in the knowledge that the carafe is never empty. I never run out of ideas. Every week, new topics come to me.

I have a vast reservoir of ideas that I’ve written down, but I never seem to get to them because new topics are always appearing.

Where does this inspiration spring from? You’ll have to ask the Universe. I just get to be the lucky one on the receiving end of all this bounty.

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Jodie Meyn:

My husband and I started curling. To be more specific, we started sliding half barrel beer kegs across an ice skating rink at an outdoor brewery in Cincinnati once a week. But isn’t it cold, you might ask? Only on the days we’ve had matches. But if you put your beer on the ice, it is the coldest most wonderful beer you’ve ever had. It also allows me to drop these words of polarizing German wisdom: “there is no bad weather, only bad clothes.” I’ve enjoyed bundling up, sitting in a booth drinking beer with my husband and then putting on two pairs of gloves, holding a beer with my over-gloved monster claws and playing a game with strangers whose names I never have to remember. If that’s not hygge/joy, what is?

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Kirk Weddle:

Joy seems rare here lately. But I do enjoy a good cup of coffee in the early morning.

photo by Kirk Weddle

My wife Tracy and I make our coffee in a Moka Pot. I love the Moka Pot, it’s simple and beautiful and make wonderful espresso. I drink mine with milk and sugar and with a pinch of cinnamon and tiny pinch of salt. I jam in a mini stick blender and froth up the whole and it’s a bit of heaven.

When the weather is decent, we sip our brew on our balcony, overlooking a vacant lot with a big pecan tree, and empty warehouses. Beyond the lot is an urban creek with concrete walls, it’s a bit stark but it’s got water and attracts birds.

Sometimes, before the city is awake you can see a Great egret fly by.

photo by Kirk Weddle

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Kathryn Reiss:

What Brings Me Joy, You Ask?

At this time of year, with the expectancy of Advent come to fruition in Christmas, with the New Year celebrated and the fresh start of resolutions and plans for future adventures before me, I am usually full of boundless good cheer and, yes, JOY.

But this year has been different. After the November election, with my moorings swept away in crashing waves of anger and sadness (What kind of country IS this? Who have we become?), I held tight to lighting the Advent candles as if I were clutching a lifeline. I celebrated Christmas with fervent prayers for a new dawn. I prayed that love might prevail in the world after all, that the threatened future of eroded rights and vanishing safety for so many might be only a nightmare from which I would soon wake in laughing relief (You won’t believe what I dreamed! So scary! Let’s make pancakes and I’ll tell you about it!).

Then I’m asked what brings me joy, and I stop to consider—pushing through the drapery of thick worry and panic determinedly held at bay. I remember the comforting words of the 14^th Century mystic, Julian of Norwich, when she wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

I taught this to my children, and I’ve occasionally told it to my college students when they feel overwhelmed by stress. I remind myself of it now, and I count my many blessings, including the Zoom book club with our little granddaughters on the opposite coast, and the video-chats with toddler grandchildren, singing along with their nursery rhymes and applauding their dinosaur roars. I remind myself of it when our youngest son, home from college, asks us if we can have a ‘Clue’ marathon after dinner. And when my husband gives me an extra-long shoulder rub, just because.

I say it to myself as a mantra, sitting by the fire with my Christmas books and pot of hot tea, crocheting a blanket for the new grandson to be born in May. What kind of country will he be born into? What kind of world? I ponder these things in my heart.

I can only trust that eventually, in God’s time, ‘all manner of things shall be well.’ I hope we live to see it. And in the meantime, I sit here crocheting garlands of stars.

photo by Kathryn Reiss

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Patrick McCarty:

I lived in Northern England for a while in the 1990s, during my twenties. One day my friend John suggested we go to the seaside, to a place called Flamborough Head, a long spit of rocky cliffs jutting into the sea for about a mile or so. It was summer, so the grass was impossibly bright and green. There was a lighthouse at the end of the headland, tall and white, like in storybooks. Little ice cream and snack carts dotted the inland side of the place, and children played among the butterflies. My friend and I ambled down the cliffs to the seashore. I found myself running around the rocks with the children, the sea lapping at my feet, staring into tidepools filled with brightly colored starfish and anemones. I kept hearing John laugh pleasantly to himself but I paid him little attention. That evening, when we returned home, I overheard him tell our friend Laurence,

“You must go with Patrick to the seaside. You’ll feel like you are five years old again. It’s quite exhilarating.”

Many years later, I took my son, Evan, to San Diego, and we, too, played in tidepools. A mother heard me talking to him about some sort of fish he knew more about than I know about my own desires in life.

A mother heard us talking and said to me, “My son is named Evan, too! We play little games with his name. We like to say, ‘Evan Eleven Sitting on Seven!”

My son, who was then himself almost eleven, stood up straight, looked toward her eyes and said, “Is that funny?”

She looked at him for a beat too long, and then at me, for some sort of help. I looked back at her thinking, “You started this, lady. You’re on your own.”

Stammering a little, she looked back at him and said, “Well, it--- rhymes…”

“But why would you say something that’s nonsense if it isn’t also funny?”, he said.

She hurried away with her little Evan and we went back to our tidepool. Apparently she didn’t wish to discuss linguistic or philosophical matters with a ten year old.

Much more recently, I visited the Redwoods to marry my favorite person. I had hoped we could find some tidepools to explore together, but the entire time we were there a king tide flooded all the beaches. Instead, we slept in a little house built on the ancient stump of an even more ancient tree, and exchanged vows in front of a couple of strangers, in the rain. I have never seen a person look more beautiful than she did when she looked at me that day.

I seldom experience emotions in real time. I often do not know or understand what emotions I feel at any given moment. But I do know when I experience joy. I think that the whole purpose of being alive is to have little moments like these, where we find joy in the world, and in ourselves, and share it with other people. I my experience, it doesn’t happen very often, and the time between those moments can be quite bleak. Quite dark. Quite terrible. But, even in our world, where everything is a commodity, and the earth everything and everyone on it is reaped for profit of someone else, there is joy to be mined from our lives. And that is, to me, worth the often painful task of plodding onward.

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Now let us know your answer in the comments…

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