Joy in Spite of Everything

A year ago today I was wandering the garden, admiring the green things peeking up through the soil, some of them well advanced.  The vinca minor was flowering here and there and the wild ginger was unfolding nearby. Out in the woods near the lot-line a few trout lilies were struggling, while within the "garden" proper the brunnera had started to produce their tiny blue petals and a few jack-in-the-pulpits were emerging.

This year, a smattering of scilla siberica are newly arrived, though you have to crouch down to see them ... and that's about it.

 Yet the temperature surpassed fifty this afternoon, the sun was out, and it suddenly seemed like the right time to clear the leaves off the garden. That's an easy, but delicate, operation. Don't want to pulverize the tender growing things beneath, such as they are.

Joy of joys!

 Last winter I cut back the nannyberry bushes to a height of eight feet, hoping for a fuller forest screen that summer,  and the passing deer did a very good job of cutting other things back too. Year after year, we've watched the vegetation come and go.

 

The other day I checked a CD out of the library called "Joy in Spite of Everything" by the Italian pianist Stefano Bollani. I'm listening to the first track, "Easy Healing," right now. The CD was produced by ECM, which means that it has an elegant booklet attached consisting of stylish photos and engineering credits but no text. That's fine by me. The media is not going to let us forget that the world is full of horrible things right now. (And we don't want to forget.) But you can conjure an ensemble of calamities to suit your taste. Right now I'm more interested in the joy.

 But what about the joy? Where do we find that in the newspapers? I don't know. But I've got to admit that I feel that emotion often. I couldn't tell you how or why. Does it come from attentiveness to the little things? From a love of music? From decades spent in the midst of a loving and stimulating relationship? Or have the years I spent studying the disasters of history given me an elevated (or lowly?) perspective from which to count my blessings?

Who can say? But it may help to acknowledge that saving the world is only one of several dimensions of spiritual life. Honoring and exploring the beauty and mystery of living, moment by moment, is another. And maybe sharing that enthusiasm is a small way of bridging the gap between the two realms. 

That's what poetry is supposed to help us do at those times when life has become a little drab. And April is National Poetry Month. Two new volumes of collected poems came my way recently, by William Matthews and Ruth Stone. Both are great, though I don't have the energy to convince you now.

I also received a review copy of the Austrian novelist Peter Handke's collected essays, Quiet Places, and one passage (though far more than one!) touches upon this issue. Handke is pondering the significance of outhouses, bathrooms, toilet stalls, and so on, which he refers to as "quiet places." Not, perhaps, a joyous subject on the face of  it. But at one point he is wandering aimlessly across Japan for a week, alone, clueless, and bewildered by the language. He finally gets his bearings in the outhouse of the temple at Nara, where a grayish but luminous quality of light overpowers him.

 "A sense of arrival, of being taken in, of here-and-now? The Quiet Place of Nara was also a site of liberation. It was not a mere refuge, not a shelter, not an out-of-the-way place. In that morning hour it was the essence of a place, such as perhaps had never existed, pure placeness. There I became—what word did people use at one time?—ebullient, filled with an invigorating, unfocused energy. The place awakened enthusiasm. Yes, a "spirit" was at work in that Quiet Place that, to paraphrase Tanizaki, provided "peace and quiet" and at the same time got one moving—a spirit of restlessness, of ebullience, of magical invulnerability ... I felt as though nothing could get to me, not even Siberian cold, and if the wood cabin, “fine graining” and all, had suddenly burst into flames with me in­side, I would have escaped without a single hair on my head singed—a pretty illusion?" 

  And right now, Hilary is in the other room, plotting out some films to see at the upcoming international film fest. And out the window here at my desk, I see a female myrtle warbler nibbling away at the ever expanding maple clusters. Though this morning, when things were still cold and gloomy, I spotted a fox sparrow and a white-throated sparrow facing off amid the leaves. Or so it appeared. In fact, I suspect they were merely stupefied with cold.

Joy in spite of everything.