In Times of Darkness, Why Court Joy?
“I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Artwork by: Pietro Soldi for Fine Acts
A few months ago, I was privileged to participate in Pourparler, a yearly gathering of dance and music callers from North America dedicated to teaching folk/ethnic/world/traditional dance in schools and communities around the world. As forty of us convened for four days of connecting, singing, dancing, and merry-making, the tragic news was flooding in about a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, that had killed eighteen people, four of them members of the deaf community. As one of our fellow participants was connected to the deaf community in Lewiston, and knew some of the victims, we all felt the sorrow and suffering intimately bound up with the joy we were creating. I felt the weight of this contradiction, and pondered whether it was right for us to continue to court joy while so many in the world were experiencing deep darkness.
In my wonderings, I have been inspired by the questions Jan Richardson poses in “Curious About Joy,” her Women’s Christmas Retreat:
In a time when the anguish of the world can flatten it right out of us, how might we become intent on joy instead of giving up on it? How might it be to approach joy as a practice—one that does not hinge on ignorance of circumstances, but staying present in the midst of them? How does celebration– the public face of joy – enable us to keep turning toward the world and each other? What might it look like for joy to be a practice that we cultivate rather than something we wait for?
While I don’t have the answers to these questions, I feel to my core the necessity of continuing to cultivate joy as a regular practice in spite of - or even as an act of resistance to - suffering. It can be so easy to see these life-giving acts as less deserving than our “real” work, pushed off until everything else is done and we have the left-over resources for it. But it is acts of joy that can sustain us and help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, hope, and the divine. Yes, even the divine! For in times of disconnect, despair, and overwhelm, collective joy-making can produce glimpses of heaven on earth by cultivating experiences where we feel fully alive, present, and connected in ways that are fleeting in everyday life.
Anthropologist Angeles Arriene, through her study of various cultures around the world, has noticed that many indigenous cultures assess overall health and wellness in ways very different from western cultures. Rather than relying solely on bodily examinations, according to Arriene, and viewing creative pursuits as essential to one’s health, some cultures wisely ask the one who is ill,
Where in your life did you stop singing? Where in your life did you stop dancing? Where in your life did you stop being enchanted by stories? And where in your life did you become uncomfortable with the sweet territory of silence?
Since reading these questions a few years ago, I have felt both haunted and inspired. In east Africa, where I lived for a time, I witnessed a culture where such actions were so deeply embedded in the fabric of society that these questions would truly have been indicators of when an illness had begun. Such everyday activities enabled a permeating joy and lightness that I had never witnessed before. When I consider these questions for my own culture here in the U.S., though, I feel a deep aching, and an ever-increasing desire for similar acts of joy to be not only nurtured, but relearned in such a way that people realize that singing, dancing, and story-telling are not only for well-polished professionals, but for all!
Knowing the profound importance of cultivating joy in our lives and in the world, then, you now may be asking, as the song says, “How can I keep from singing (& dancing!)?”
This article was written for the Isidorian- an annual 'zine' publication produced by St. Isidore farm. This year on the theme- Repair. Not on our farm’s mailing list but interested in receiving a copy? Email me at groundswellcmty@gmail.com to get added.