Joy

When I was a little girl I loved to sit under the lemon tree in our backyard. I’d watch the insects busy with their lives and feel a sense of kinship with them. My older brother, who was troubled and angry, would pull the wings off my small friends and I’d exclaim, “Bugs have feelings too!” He teased me about this mercilessly and, to this day, shames me for be “naive”, and “Polyanna”. As an adult, I now see that what he was condemning is possibly the most beautiful part of me, my love of all live forms.

It's a bully’s intention to bring you to the angry sad place where they reside. We live in a time when bullying and cruelty is on full display in our current administration-and its coming at us from all sides. I’ve learned from my brother that one of the tactics used while trying to control the narrative is to twist words and emotions that are beautiful into something ugly. This is what they are attempting to do with the word “woke”. Being “woke” is caring about the planet and all its life forms. It is being awake to our oneness with life and feeling a sense of joy in out everyday life. I embrace being woke and much prefer it to being its opposite, asleep.

Today it is revolutionary to care, to love, to feel joy. Sometimes we may feel ashamed to express joy when so many are suffering terribly. When asked if it was OK to be happy when there’s so much suffering happening, Roshi Bernie Glassman said, “I think it’s a requirement to be full of joy in the midst of suffering”. He talked about how Wavy Gravy, friend of the Grateful Dead, has a manuscript of humor written by inmates in Auschwitz. If inmates in Auschwitz and find humor I believe we can also.

It is not naive or ignorant to be joyful. Joy is as much of an essential piece of being human as suffering. We need to be able to hold these two in the same hand. That is what we are called to do now. To embrace our wokeness and bring joy into the dark places, to love one another with unrelenting fierceness. That is revolutionary, that is bad ass.