Some Things I (Might) Know About Joy

Who is she and how do we find her? Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

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Where I Found Joy This Week:

1. This song, which is the exact energy of The Sun, stepping into the summer, being hot, loving life etc

2. I went to the gym with a buddy this week. Exercise tends to be my meditative space, but this week I loosened my grip on what I could find there, invited community, and created play. It transformed the practice entirely for me. My Taurus moon changes a routine once every 5 years so thank you in advance for the applause.

3. I sat in the park in a crowd of gorgeous, well-dressed Black folks sweating my ass off, celebrated a friend’s birthday, and developed several crushes on people I may never see again. J’adore.

4. I picked up two new pieces I threw at the pottery studio, and they were significantly better than the last collection. I’m starting to notice a signature in what I create - something only my hands could form - and that feels sacred and good.

5. I shed full blown tears watching the first episode of Netflix’s High on the Hog - and then watched the entire season. It’s about the deep relationship between Black food and American history. The takeaway: we venerate our ancestors when we venerate our food. To fear food is to fear community and to fear ourselves. Also - Black folks created catering. You should watch it!

6. I devoured In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, completely unlocking a new language to translate trauma. Recommend!

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"Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means you are alive." - Franz Kafka

I’m not sure what Joy is exactly, but I know I want to be drenched in it for eternity and the impossibility of this makes me bubble up in the center at the next chance we can meet again. What I know about Joy? I know we fear it, because we aren’t sure it will stay forever - it won’t and that may be what makes it so damn tasty. I know we try to grip it with white knuckles while forgetting we have infinite source to Joy within. I know we trade it in for conformity. Above all else, what I know about Joy is that it is a reminder that goodness exists. Even in the heaviest oppression, seemingly insurmountable suffering, and the darkest of days, Joy persists and serves as a table for humanity to kick our legs up, and share in what has kept us going - us. Famously, Joy is an act of resistance. Joy is the “new forces that come marching up,” meaning we are alive.

Here’s a poem which I feel is about Joy in the most complicated way, as new forces present themselves:

BLACK JOY

We were spanked for each other’s sins.
Spanked in syllables and by the word of God.
Before dark meant home time.

My grandmother’s mattress
knew each of my
siblings,
cousins,
and the neighbor’s children’s
morning breath
By name.

A single mattress spread on the floor was enough for all of us.

Bread slices were buttered with iRama
and rolled into sausage shapes;
we had it with black rooibos, we did not ask for cheese.

We were filled.

My cousins and I would gather around one large bowl of umngqusho,
each with their own spoon.
Sugar water completed the meal.

We were home and whole.

But
isn’t funny?
That when they ask about black childhood,
all they are interested in is our pain,
as if the joy-parts were accidental.

I write love poems, too,
but
you only want to see my mouth torn open in protest,
as if my mouth were a wound
with pus and gangrene
for joy.
– by Koleka Putuma

Corny Is As Joy Does

Every day I hop on Tiffany Pollard’s internet and see folks making fun of someone else’s Joy - the way someone dances, how another person chooses to express themselves, what people consider to be fun. Of course, those who criticize are always dragging what they want most - to exist without inhibitions and the voice in the back of their head telling them to be cool instead. Even as ADULTS! Grow up! If comparison is the thief of joy, I think being corny might be the embodiment of it.

Corniness is the corruption of shame. In The Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde discusses how oppression perpetuates itself by corrupting “those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” In patriarchal societies, she states, this is ushered in by the denigration of “feminine forms of joy” like art, fashion, and film. With her considerations in mind, I find it interesting that so much of the internet’s humor is dedicated to shitting on things young women, or once young women, find Joy in. The literal fall season has been cancelled because women love it too much. Romance novels are considered low-brow, despite being what flies off the shelves. Rom-coms are considered unrealistic nonsense (like anything in TV land is fucking real), and fashion is considered frivolous. And now, there’s this new word “Cheugy,” which is frankly white women’s business, but is in essence yet another trend set up to shit on things young women once really enjoyed.

Alleanna Harris

This makes me think of the ritual of going to the beauty supply store. When in doubt, go to the beauty supply. When you’re broke but want to feel enoughness, go to the beauty supply. As a maximalist, I do think buying affordable Venusian shit sparks Joy so I won’t be hearing any of that Marie Kondo nonsense. Anyway, the gold bamboo earrings, chain necklaces, cherry tube lip gloss, long lashes, colorful bits and bobbles in the hair on trend in every store today are a talisman of Black Girl Joy.

Our persistence in seeking creativity in personal expression which oppressive systems seek to corrupt, call ghetto, exploit for gain on anybody but us, is what makes Joy an act of resistance. It’s an “energy for change,” a cultivation of an existence in opposition of oppressive structures without violence.

Frankly, I’m ready to be Disney Adult level of No-Fucks-Given in the name of Joy. Those MF’s live for the thrill of being corny and drowning in fantasy. They sacrifice conformity, put Micky Mouse bumper stickers on their cars and host Disney themed weddings and I’m fucking with the vision. When was the last time you sacrificed conformity with others for the feeling of belonging within yourself?

Happiness v. Joy - Are they diff orrrrrr?

I think there’s a difference between happiness and Joy. Happiness, I believe, is a state of maintenance, ebbs and flows of general contentment that find equilibrium. Joy, however, is fleeting. It has a level of excitement to it. In No Mud, No Lotus, Thich Nhat Nanh describes Joy as walking through the desert for days and seeing an oasis with fresh water in the immediate distance, and happiness as the experience of actually drinking the water and being nourished by it indefinitely. If we immediately jumped into concern about how we would bottle the oasis up for the rest of our journey, we would rob ourselves of joy instantly. And so it seems, Joy is a celebration of life’s surprises when we are present. What you see in ordinary circumstances when you’re brave enough to be all the way there.

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We try to hoard Joy before we’ve fully softened to it, like going to the gift shop at the beginning of a Broadway show, or buying a snow-globe with Kauai in the middle so you can experience vacation all year long. But those things collect dust, over time they mean less and less, and the memories within them become stale. Because our Joy was left at the show, on the island, in the arms of our bestie, on the lips of our honey. They say it can’t be summoned like a spell if it’s a surprise, but I think the mastery of presence allows us to cultivate Joy as much as we are mindful. As much as we are willing to stop and stare, and gawk in awe, and fully belly laugh.

Contrary to what Miss Bedingfield says, I’m not sure you can have a pocket full of sunshine or rather, I’m not sure why you’d want one. Joy is too serendipitous to be shoved in denim and saved for later. We can generate as many intense experiences of pleasurable emotions as we want when we honor the now. When we want to buy a bottle of bubbles from the $1 Target section at 27 years old, when we look a second longer at the flowers on your walk home, when we practice gratitude for the small pockets of delight we create in our daily spaces. Not all goodness is found in the extraordinary, but in the perfectly ordinary which we take for granted.

Joy is in the senses. It’s the juice from mango dripping down your chin, grass sneaking between your toes, even accidentally swallowing a mouth full of the ocean sending you into a retching cough followed by giggles because you dared challenge the source of mankind. It’s sobering.

Last week, I ran into two acquaintances at an event of not so familiar faces after a year in isolation. We exchanged niceties about how incredible it was to see Blackness in community again at Fort Greene Park that day, like we never left. In jest, one of us started to sing a ridiculous song from TikTok, and then the rest of us started to harmonize, and Joy billowed up into the sky from our diaphragms and drifted away. I settled into embrace of this world, these people, that song, and I knew Joy - not in the form of euphoria - but in being so incredibly here.

To circle back to our example of walking in the desert, I think part of the yumminess of spotting the oasis is the extreme awareness of both your thirst and excitement that you’re so close to quenching it. Joy can exist in ways that aren’t just explosive, but a soft hum leading to truth. Joy exists in illumination, too. When we can finally put our tongue on it, name it, own it. Whatever it may be. In the Tarot, The Sun is known as the most joyful card in the deck. It depicts a whole ass smiling baby on a white horse in front of an anthropomorphized sun with decorative sunflowers beneath it. Joy, bitch!

The thing is - The Sun shows up even when you don’t feel so happy. For example, I pulled The Sun the day I broke up with someone, and I understood what it meant to exploit the bounds of Joy that edge something like somberness in any given moment. Joy is not the antithesis of sadness, but the antithesis of fear. I realized on the day of said breakup, which was a long time coming, that I was experiencing sobering clarity, like I got a new pair of eyes and could see myself - how I’d been living in denial of an inevitable ending, how much I’d been avoiding feeling loss and sadness in favor of being swallowed by fear - and it was freedom. Just like that fucking baby on the white horse.

Naming fear is a version of Joy because once you name fear it is stripped of power, the veil of uncertainty and doubt is lifted, and you’re seen again. Joy is not just delight, but an illumination of your path - that you’ve found fresh water and will be thirsty no longer.

Journal Prompts On Joy

What conditions for joy do you feel you lack and why?

Where is joy presenting itself in your daily life?

What joys await you beyond conformity?

What is being illuminated in you right now? How is it informing what joy looks like to you?

What are you taking for granted at the moment? How can we give thanks?