“yes, joy is the thing that has returned, and not a moment too soon.”(john pavlovitz)
like you, i’ve interviewed for many positions in my life. many of them were positions in non-profits. i spent thirty-five years as a minister of music in churches. i was asked the question “what do you bring to this job?” multiple times. i always answered the same way: “joy.”“i will always lead with joy,” i would add. and then this: “if you want perfection and not a joy-filled music program, i am not your person.”
as an entrepreneur, recording/performing artist and in managing roles i’ve also interviewed many people. i always looked for joy. for without it, life is flat. for without it, there is rote drudgery. without it, things seem dark. without it, there is doom and gloom, there is no hope, there is no light. without it, worthy projects, generosity and communities will not survive, will not thrive.
in the last two weeks i have been absolutely struck by the absolute change in vibration of the air around us. suddenly – with the advent of change in this election – we can see, hear, taste, FEEL joy. JOY.
“it’s a mystery. grace. it falls on us like morning dew, each and every day. we rise, buoyant or troubled, joyous or grieving, in clarity or murky, in the light or in the dark.we step into next, knowing we have yet another chance.” (nov. 22, 2019 & august 20, 2021)
we are in the grace of joy.
we are feeling hope and light. we are feeling the freedom to laugh, to dance. we are feeling open hearts. we are feeling possibility. to live life. to experience – in all its complexities and differences – in grace – living together. we are tasting the future.
we passed by this nametag sticker stuck to the street merely three days before our president ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch of election to our vice-president. we were crossing the street and when we reached the other side i went back to photograph it. in an incredibly fraught time, “grace” caught my attention. we didn’t know then that a few days later we would be in a different election. we didn’t know that less than two weeks later we would be remembering what real joy is.
in joe’s love for this country and sacrifice of personal ambition and in kamala’s vibrant love of life and dedication to this democracy, we can dream, we can aspire – once again – for the best of what these united states of america can be.
joie de vivre…is falling on us like morning dew…we have yet another chance…
we can choose this. we can vote for this.
“…so everyone can pursue happiness unfettered…”(john pavlovitz)
it is impossible to not feel it. it swirls around us. it stirs us.
this season. a season of light and hope and generosity, a season of consideration and thoughtfulness and compassion, a season of simplicity and complexity, a season of love and grace and possibility. a season of deep gratitude.
we sit still – eyes closed – and take it in.
wishing you these gifts now. wishing you these gifts every day.
“but it’s the holidays!” you protest. and yes, it is.
yet – in these days, in this community, this country, this world – there’s more going on than simply jingling bells and twinkling lights, a sleigh of gifts and eight reindeer, manger scenes and menorahs. and even now – in the middle of all of this – even in the middle of festivities – we need to pay attention.
it’s risky to disagree. it’s risky to push back. it’s risky to declare that which has or those whom have wronged you or others. the membrane is thick and unforgiving, even vindictive. it’s risky to break the code of silence.
but it’s necessary.
to speak the crime/the wrong/the slight – the action or inaction – is not a crime, though those within the bonds of the code would want you to believe that. it is either impossible for them to see the forest for the trees or it has come to the time that no longer matters to them. to step out, to speak out, to speak against, to speak for – all are looked upon as deviant when silence is broken. righteous pontificators rail against the sole “deviant” – the one who stops the actual deviance, the one who holds the actual deviants accountable. they gather troops around themselves, searching for – or convincing – others of their sanctimonious correctness. they are invigorated by the quest to maintain the code – no longer merely complicit – instead, enabling – involving themselves in the dirty deeds of the codemakers. their silence is active, perpetuating the wrong. and the circle exacerbates itself – concentrically outward – into an organization, a community, a government, a country, a world. and it is ugly.
for those out there who are questioning and breaking the code of silence, for those who are pushing back against injustice or inequity, for those who are pulling back the curtain exposing, revealing wrongs – whether small or overwhelming, for those who are not fostering complicity or harboring or sustaining wrongfulness, for those who have reached the place of “enough!”, for those holding fast to the values of goodness, for those who are actively pursuing democratic freedoms of choice for all peoples – i hope this season of light would grant unto you courage and fortitude, empowerment in vulnerability, the ability to stand tall and proud, others to stand with you, trust in the process of bushwhacking your way to revealing truth, accountability in the end, recovery and peace. i hope this season of light reminds you of your value. i hope this season will touch you beyond your wildest imagination and that jingling bells and twinkling lights – and all the other trappings of this season – will dull in comparison to the light you have brought in your deviance – breaking the code of silence and bringing forth truth and justice. you are necessary.
the des plaines river trail is in several sections. there’s a section that circles round a lake. there’s a section that loops through the forest. and there are sections that run next to the river. in order to control invasive species and to maintain resources, the state of illinois has controlled burns each spring and fall. oaks and hickories have thick bark to shield them and native plant species have deep taproot systems to survive the intense heat. in fact, this carefully maintained ecosystem often contributes to more robust plants after the burn.
we came upon the remains. we hadn’t been on the loop in days and were surprised to see the blackened earth, stalks of char. when the snow fell, it became a landscape – seemingly – of black and white. yet the squirrels ran rampant and we couldn’t feel any stress from the underbrush – like when there is an unexpected fire and the land is scorched.
i knelt down in front of the charred cattails and started to photograph them.
and suddenly there were tears in my eyes. i could feel the fire and the scorched-ness, the cooling snow blanketing it all, the energy still there – underground. i could feel the tenacity of these stalks and twigs, having survived the storm of the planned fire, ready for rejuvenation, resurgence. scrappy and resilient, potent, sturdy – the light past the dark. the recovery post-fire, post-exploration, a renewal. i could feel their passage through it.
i held hands with the cattails as i knelt on the snowy ground. braced, the taproot within – infinite – held fast, reassured me.
and with them i peered into the dark and saw that the light was right there, just beyond the charred edges.
we were sitting on our infamous adirondack chairs on the patio. the sky was brilliant blue – much like in this photograph. so much was going on. we were taking a few-minutes-breather.
and suddenly, it was like tiny sparkles were landing on us – the tiniest raindrops we’d ever seen. one by one we’d sense them landing on bare arms. you could barely see them, barely feel them. but as they floated down they glittered like the eensiest dew drops in a sunrise ray, iridescent shimmers falling from the sky. it is hard to wrap words around this. but it was like being blessed by the universe, like minute stars touching us. grace. light. magic dust.
it’s not like we aren’t surrounded by these. glimmers. moments that radiate. moments that make you feel amazed to be alive. moments of joy or peace. they are – truly – everywhere. gentle touches of reassurance or comfort, reminders of bliss – out there. not magnificently large summits but micro moments in real living, real time, lingering in the air waiting for us to notice.
and when you notice…as a deliberate practice or an unanticipated surprise…the energy of your stardust quivers in goodness.
you are surrounded by the forest – dense, unyielding, a bit dark. though there are paths, they are still shadowed by big trees, overgrowth that doesn’t seem to allow in the light. and then – as you are plodding on and on, making an effort to maintain your equilibrium, to stay in center, you come to the tiniest clearing. and, looking up, there is sky. clear blue sky.
a periscope to the universe.
and suddenly, your worries and angsts, your doubts, your lost road are scaled down, lessened to tiny pinpricks of stars, unseen in the day-sky, though ever-there, allayed in the bluest-blue, soothing hope in the periscope, a reminder of perspective and time and expanse and right now.
and you stand, with all the creatures in the forest, and look up – for minutes and minutes unblinking until you are slightly dizzy from your stillness. and you lower your head, stretching your neck, your gaze-to-the-heavens broken.
but you are moved. you are reminded of your tiny-ness in the vastness. you remember you are part of this universe and, that just as you are not alone in the light that the leaf-periscope offers, you are not alone in the dark either.
you breathe. a deep breath. a prayer. a gratitude.
and you walk on in the forest, knowing, for certain, that you will find natural clearings with big spaces of light. knowing, too, that curling your hand into itself and peering through – like a hand-periscope – you can focus on smaller bits of the forest and within it, find the bits of light between the leaves.
the owl feather lay on our trail. soft down curled at its base, it was striking against the dirt of our path. we stopped.
the trail has different rules. the point is never to hurry. it is never to walk without open eyes. it is never to pass by that which draws or beckons. instead, it is to take the time, to go slower, to see what is there – in all its mysterious beauty. and, though this is the most familiar of our trails, there is not a time we have hiked it that we have not seen something new, something informative, something so beautiful – even in its simplicity – that we had to stop and photograph it.
it IS how the world is, she said. it exists just the same way as the dark exists. we were talking about goodness, the presence of goodness, the pay-it-forward of goodness. i was wistfully talking about a world that valued goodness, that lingered in kindness, that held beauty in gratitude, that was full of light and hope and the love of one another. her words stopped me.
it does exist. and, yes, it exists the same way as all the dark in the world exists. it’s a profound thought.
we were walking out to big red to go take a hike. a beautiful black crow feather lay waiting on the driveway.
next to littlebabyscion was a smaller feather, perhaps one from a robin that sang the sun up earlier in the day.
to read about owl feathers and crow feathers and robin feathers, one finds a plethora of information, some seemingly opposite in meaning. but the one thing that all feathers seem to represent across the board is that there are angels with you, there is a connection to the spiritual world.
whatever you perceive that to be, it would seem that a connection to the comfort and love of those who passed before or the eternal wisdom, the resilience, the goodness of the universe would be a good thing.
on the side of the willis tower – downtown chicago – is affixed the atmospheric wave wall. created by the same artist whose rainbow bridgewe loved at the milwaukee art museum, olafur eliasson’s piece is striking and imbues the colors of the lakefront – sky, clouds, water in all its moods.
in speaking about his piece, olafur – also a climate and community activist – says, “what we see depends on our point of view: understanding this is an important step toward realizing that we can change reality. it is my hope that this subtle intervention can make a positive contribution to the building and to the local community by reflecting the complex activity all around us, the invisible interactions and minute fluctuations that make up our shared public space.”
the steel catches the light of the sun. the piece seemingly shifts with the movements of everything around it, with time as time passes.
we have not yet seen it at night – lit from behind – but i imagine it is stunning – with light escaping from the intersection of the colored tiles. the places of light: in-between.
just as weird as it was to sit on the train it was equally with wonder to move freely about in the city – after all this time and so much that has happened in our country – sans innocence. it is with a bit of heightened awareness we move in the world now, though i don’t suppose heightened awareness helped any of the victims of the latest violent rages at the hands of angry out-of-control people. it is impossible to figure out why the wrong front door or the wrong driveway or the wrong ask-of-a-neighbor could elicit such unconscionably brutal responses.
we were driving to the grocery store. we took the route we usually take, a side street. two-thirds of the way down this road – before the traffic light – our attention was driven to a guy on the sidewalk, staring at us. brandishing something – we don’t know what – he flailed his arm around, pointing to the sidewalk, swinging, pointing, staring at us.
pre-whatever-phase-one-would-call-the-phase-that-this-country-is-in we probably wouldn’t have thought twice. we might have wondered what he was doing, might have wondered why he stared at us, might have pondered what he was brandishing. but we wouldn’t have been entirely creeped out and we wouldn’t have planned a different route home and, perhaps, a different route to our store for the continuing future. it felt like the place between was unsafe. and i find that devastatingly sad.
we live in a normal midwest town. only – i guess – not so much. our town is now known – in these last years of the more-unsafe-phase – for a plethora of events that have no light in-between. our small city is as broken as every other small city, as every other big city.
were there to be a wall of art to represent this phase of our world what colors would it be?
in his rush to get one of the coveted front spots at costco, the guy in the infinity cut me off in the parking lot. i parked in a different row, but watched as he got out of his car. he bent down and pulled out some kind of revolver, tucking it into the back waistband of his pants. then he walked into the store.
i must say – i haven’t ever felt a need to protect myself in costco. maybe from overspending, but never from violence. it was disturbing – almost to the point of turning around and going home – to know this guy was walking around – maybe getting a rotisserie chicken or ribs or a bottle of wine or eddie-bauer-sweats or glucosamine-in-bulk – with some big handgun in his pants. i told d about my reticence to go into the store.
we have a code word for anytime we are in a situation that suddenly feels unsafe. post-parade-massacres, post-grocery-store-shootings, post-concert-devastation, post-festival-tragedies, post-school-maulings – post-all-of-it and in the middle of all of it – we know to drop everything and get out or get away if either of us senses danger. no questions asked. no lingering. just go.
it is without light in-between that this country has come to this point. the intersections of peoples and genders and ethnicities and belief systems and economic statuses and, apparently, any differences whatsoever, seem to have no light. they are not backlit nor are they reflective of the sun streaming over this land.
“our shared public space.” shared. from sea to shining sea.
how do we create the invisible interactions and minute fluctuations of a safe shared public space? how – in a country that seems to have insidious anger and no shortage of violence – do we find the light in-between us? because “we can change reality”.
it would appear that a giant angel was hula-hooping in the clouds and dropped their hula hoop, which landed in the upper branches of a tree at the botanic garden. or, perhaps, that a spaceship -with no defined interior- had dropped down for a visit. or, maybe, there was a filming of sesame street’s “the letter ‘o'” about to do another take. brightly lit hula hoops of neon light suspended in trees, they cast an eerie glow onto the frozen ground, onto the path. michael bublé sang “walking in a winter wonderland” and we found ourselves inside the magic.
there is definitely something to wandering paths amongst many other people all oohing and ahhing. i had vowed to myself to leave my camera in my purse, but it wasn’t minutes before i failed at this. there were just so many colors and textures to remember, so dreamy. vast installations of creative lighting.
we had hoped to go. the ticket cost was a little prohibitive but we decided – when we woke and new year’s day was to be a little more mild than it had been – to splurge.
we were stunned even at the entrance to the garden, the trees wrapped in lights, every single branch and twig gleaming. we moseyed along the path, pulling over to let groups of people by so that we could be somewhat alone as we strolled.
but this wasn’t a silent and solitary hike in the woods. it was a performance piece we all took in together. each person’s glee added to ours and, dropping all expectations and all analysis of how-do-they-do-that, we were caught up in the captivating displays.
we already have a plan for next year. there are snacks and beverages and fire pits, places to linger, places to immerse. i could stand and watch the water and light “all i want for christmas” over and over and over. i allowed myself to wonder what a garden would look like lit to a piece of my own music.
we talked about our favorite displays driving the backroads. though spaceship fantasies are not my thing, hula hoops definitely are in my wheelhouse and the hulahooplights made my list. by the time we got home we realized that we had listed all of the displays we had seen, each design extraordinary, a celebration of the marriage of color and light and and sound and garden.
our late-night snack had a different air. the gift of being outside in the cold. the gift of beauty. the gift we had given ourselves – permission to splurge a little. a new year and its new intentions.
“…and now, you’re here, in a world of hypocrisy and your love can heal us all.” (you’re here – kerri sherwood)
in a universe fraught with challenge, an overabundance of materialism, a shortage of generous kindness, with unprecedented division and bigotry and marginalization of people, it would seem that whatever deity to whom we choose to turn – by whatever name we choose to whisper in prayer or utter in beseeching voices – that, in our turning, we look for light. it would seem that our fervent wish be healing.
it is not complicated.
it is simply love.
*****
YOU’RE HERE – kerri sherwood (recorded on an iphone at the keys of an out-of-tune church piano. maybe one of these days i will be able to record it properly.)
and here – another slice of the celebration of the season – from years ago:
and – in this week of preparation – i am reminded of previous years, many, many people gathered in community singing in celebration.
it is the work and the gift of a minister of music to help bring ancient stories to the hearts of people, to help those stories resonate – to help that which is not seen, that which is so mysterious, be felt – through music. we choose melodies that soar, harmonies that weep; we choose lyrics that tug.
my memory bank is full of solos and anthems and cantatas from decades of bringing them to congregations. this is an excerpt of narration and a song from a cantata i composed years ago called “the light is here – a christmas cantata”. this particular recording was performed by the choir of first united methodist church.
THE LIGHT IS HERE – excerpts – narration & HOLY – kerri sherwood
reverse threading 