I think I'll Call It Joy...

…that is, what’s born of the relinquishment. A Mark Nepo quote has been tugging at my sleeve, following me around, since the final session of the poetry class I took with Shira Erlichman last fall, The Seven Gates to Awe. The final gate was joy (we chose the order together as a group).

Nepo writes, “Often, what keeps us from joy is the menacing assumption that life is happening other than where we are. So we are always leaving, running from or running to. All the while, joy rises like summer wind, waiting for us to grow in the open, large as willows it can sing through. Yet failing to grow in the open, we can be worn to it. Though working with what we’re given till it wears us through seems to be the grace we resist. Like everyone, I’ve spent so much of my life fearing pain that I’ve seldom felt things all the way through. And falling through more than working through, I’ve learned that if we can stay true to our experience and to each other, and face the spirit that experience and love carry, we will eventually be reduced to joy. Like cliffs worn to their beauty by the pounding of the sea, if we can hold each other up, all that will be left will be wonder and joy.”1

Reduced! A little voice in my head shouts, haven’t we been reduced, knocked down, belittled enough? A similar voice piped up when I read Essex Hemphill’s lines, “I enter the diminishing / circumstance of prayer” in his poem “Heavy Breathing.” Aren’t we already diminished constantly?

This sort of reduction and diminishment were made clear and beautiful by Alexis Pauline Gumbs during a pre-solistice clearing session she offered called Time splits. She read Audre Lorde’s poem “125th Street and Abomey,” from the book Black Unicorn, part of which goes: “I poured on the red earth in your honor / those ancient parts of me / most precious and least needed / my well-guarded past / the energy-eating secrets”

She asked us to consider which parts/beliefs/habits/patterns/assumptions seem most precious but are actually least necessary? What might need to be laid down in the name of our freedom? Whew. Here’s a recording of the session.

When we’re willing to face the difficulty, the pain, it (saltwater..) grinds down the cliffs. Salt known for exfoliative capacities, we’re polished, shining now having been mercifully diminished. The hostile, rotted patterns can, apparently, be poured out; shit might even start to grow out of this wet earth (ourselves) if we wait a few months.