"Honeymoon with Big Joy" #2

Featuring Ross Gay and Ruth Moody

Oct 03, 2023

Welcome to “Honeymoon with Big Joy”

Remember, you’re the co-creator of this dive. Do as much or as little as you’d like, when you’d like, how you’d like, with the materials I provide. Just keep gentle faith with yourself.

Set your intention

Take a moment to name the primary intention you have for this month-long deep dive and/or this particular session. Take a quiet moment to center yourself in that intention.

En-JOY the music

Read the selection

I invite you to read this piece twice—aloud, at least once. You may also listen to my reading, perhaps with your eyes closed.

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-3:59

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[FROM INCITING JOY]
Ross Gay

. . . we often think of joy as meaning “without pain,” or “without sorrow”—which, to reiterate, our consumer culture has us believing is a state of being that we could buy—not only is it sometimes considered “unserious” or frivolous to talk about joy (i.e. But there’s so much pain in the world!), but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without—or maybe a more accurate phrase is free of—heartbreak or sorrow. Which I’m pretty sure you only get to do if you have no relationships, love nothing, are a sociopath, and maybe, if you’re enlightened. I don’t know about you, but I check none of these boxes.

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?

. . .

My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.

(from Inciting Joy: Essays)

Contemplate/Create

Use any of these questions however you wish—e.g., as openings for meditation or prayer, as prompts for journaling or poetry-writing, as sparks for drawing or painting, as catalysts for change-making . . . You may also ignore my questions altogether to go off in other directions!

How does your typical view of joy (and sorrow) compare or contrast to Ross Gay’s? Is Gay’s invitation to reconsider “joy” as always entangled with suffering helpful to you?
In what way(s) might joy be a “practice”?
Reflect on/write about a time when you felt “joy efflorescing” or blossoming from you, perhaps even in the midst of difficulty. Praise it. Give thanks for it. What happens to you (body, heart, mind, spirit) when you bring this memory forward?

Want to visit with other Rafters in the Deep Dive?

Here are two options: either leave a comment on this post using the button, or join the chat thread dedicated to this Deep Dive. (Note: if you haven’t created a Substack profile yet, you’ll be asked to do so before you can comment or chat.)

Join us on October 31 for “Rafter Refuge”!

6:30-8:00PM Central (7:30 ET, 5:30 MT, 4:30 PT)

Let’s close this Deep Dive with a time of voluntary sharing. (It’s fine just to listen!) Come and reflect with other Rafters on “Honeymoon with Big Joy.” Registration is required for this celebration.