You Are Allowed to Feel Joy

 

“You are allowed to feel joy,” said the on-line workshop leader.  Despite the news, the threats, the changing weather, the pandemic and the fear, you are allowed to feel joy.  This was the invitation, the permission I seemed to have been waiting for.  My inner knowing knew this, my body knew this but my human mind had bought into the belief that suffering is more worthy of my attention than joy. 

I began to pay attention to when I felt joy in my everyday life – joy that didn’t require a lot of mental machinations -- spontaneous eruptions so to speak.   Spending time in the circular community garden in the park beside my home gave me the opportunity to watch small children interact with the plants and the water in the watering cans.  One child discovered a green squash hiding under the big squash leaves and I experienced joy at his find.  Watching kids pick lettuce or kale and pop it into their mouths also brings joy.

The hidden squash revealed!

Joy allows me to expand.  It is fuel for creativity.  When I stand and look at all the plants in the community garden noticing their differences in shape, shade of green, and colour of flower, I feel a kind of joy at their sharing of space.  Being a part of this co-creation of plants, insects, soil, air, water, sun and humans fuels my sense of myself as a creatrix, as a co-creator.

Fear, on the other hand, causes me to contract, to think small, to feel alone, to hoard, to worry. It keeps me awake at night.  But, Sharing food from the garden with friends, neighbours and visitors brings me joy.  I feel abundant as I share the gifts of the plants with humans.  I naturally appreciate the food that we have grown there.  I feel connected.

Down the hill from the garden is the lakeshore.  This part of Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) is called Sturgeon Bay.  There is a small beach that allows easy entry into the lake for humans.  As I walk down the sunny road towards the lake, I usually get warmer and warmer so that once I reach the beach, I am ready to cool down in the clear water.  Yesterday, the wind was blowing from the west and the waves were rolling in.  As I felt the waves move through my body, I asked the lake to wash away the suffering that my body still held.  Some of this is my own clearing of ancestral wounds and some of this is the pain of others that I have unconsciously picked up.  I have to tell myself that empathy doesn’t mean carrying around the pain of other people in my own body.  It means walking with them in a compassionate way and making sure that I am taken care of so that I can do that walking.

The female corn flower has silk threads that lead to the ovule inside the husk.

Seemingly overnight, the corn in the community garden has produced the beginnings of cobs with their silky threads waving in the wind.  The male flowers have already emerged and are producing pollen that will travel down the silky tubes to produce kernels of corn in the ovules.  I have seen corn growing in fields for my whole life, but this is the first time that I have been able to closely observe the life cycle of corn.  It is stunning and I feel joy just watching it emerge.

The male flowers or tassels produce pollen which is carried by the wind to
the silky threads of other corn plants.

http://pgandp.org/hybridcorn

This morning, my partner and I went down to our dock to cut back some of the Red Osier Dogwood that has grown over the walkways.  In a few weeks, his grown children and grandchildren will visit and we want to make it safe for them to walk beside the water.  After trimming the dogwood, he carried it up to the big compost pile near the road.  Just after placing the cut pieces on the earth, a beautiful hummingbird appeared and hovered just in front of him.  He experienced pure joy in that moment.  To me, this gift of joy spoke to letting go of what is in the way or no longer needed.  In so doing, he was gifted with joy.

As we walked home, my partner spied a chipmunk sitting on a rock amidst wildflowers, eating a black raspberry.  The chipmunk was un-phased by our presence and we managed to take a photo.  We could see a mom pulling a wagon with a toddler walking ahead of her coming towards us on the sidewalk.  We quietly brought the little boy’s attention to the chipmunk so he could experience this magical moment as well.  He was as happy as we were.

Chipmunk enjoying a black raspberry on a rock beside the sidewalk.

Both suffering and joy are a part of life.  However, too much focus on suffering leads to a sense of hopelessness and giving up.  There is so much healing work that needs to be done and stamina is a necessary part of this work.  Paying attention in the moment to the magic that is present allows joy to fuel us for this work.  Children know this.  Dogs seem to know this.  Hummingbirds and flowers teach us this as well.  And we know this as well, in the little moments of magic that uplift us and bring wind to our sails.  We are allowed to feel joy.

Echinacea and Sweetgrass bring healing.

Message of the New Buds

 

Fed by the sugars in your roots,

Wisdom stored from your lifetime of experiences,

Sugars that have travelled in water,

Up your trunk, along your branches,

Wisdom moving through your spinal chord,

along your peripheral nerves,

Across the synaptic gaps.

And now, the sugars feed your tender buds,

Allowing them to grow and expand into leaves,

That will create more sugars that will descend,

Along the branches and trunk into the roots.

Your new buds, new experiences, new abilities,

Will create more wisdom that you will store,

And use again and again to expand.

It is impossible to stop growing while alive.

You know what you are doing --

You always have.

Learning About Interbeing in the Garden

 

Lately, I have taken to going to sit within the circle of the community garden in the park next to my house.  I sit on the lower cedar log that is part of the “container” that holds the soil in place.  This brings me to eye level with the tomatoes.  I can glance down at the kale or up at the corn.  This point of view brings me into the diversity of the garden physically and visually.

The community garden is built in a circle and has a wide diversity of plants within this circle.

I have been bringing my sketchbook, colouring pencils and a black fine tip pen with me.  One way of being totally present in the moment is to draw what is around me.  Particular attention must be paid to shape and colour and I see things that would have otherwise been missed with a cursory glance.  There are many, many shades of green around me, too many to accurately depict with my four green colouring pencils, but I do my best.  The curly kale is a bluish green and the dinosaur kale is a greyish green beside the grey-white sage that contrasts beautifully with the fuscia coloured flowers beside it.  The new corn leaves are bright green especially when they are backlit by the sun.

I picked the end off of a carrot top and took care to draw out its intricate design of feathery leaflets. Outlining the drawings with the thin black marker makes the shapes pop off of the blank page of my sketchbook.  The calendula and nasturtium seeds that I got from the local Seed Library have grown and are now flowering in hanging pots at the sidewalk side of the garden.  I celebrated their beauty by drawing them.

Calendula flower

 

As I moved from one plant to another, noticing the different shapes and colours I began to feel like just another species amongst many.  There were no other humans to compare myself to.  My age, size and shape no longer mattered.  I was just one of many sizes and shapes.  A white Cabbage Moth fluttered amongst the plants and landed on the soil from time to time, perhaps looking for minerals.  A bee arrived at one of the cucumber flowers seeking pollen.  The toad that only comes out in the evening did not make an appearance except in my memory.

I was no longer the gardener, the caretaker, the one who watered, weeded and harvested.  I was the one who admired, the student, the youngest sibling in an ancient family.  As I sketched the Three Sisters; corn, beans and squash that have been grown as companions for thousands of years here on Turtle Island by Indigenous Peoples, I became aware of my interbeing with all of these plants.  They magically turn soil, water, sunshine and air into food that I will eat.  All the elements will become the plants and then will become my physical body and on the cycle will go.  

I feel at home and at peace in the garden.  I can experience the moment and my interconnections, my interbeing as Thich Nhat Hanh would say.  My hope in helping to co-create this garden was that the Three Sisters could teach us how to grow community.  And so, I go and sit with them, listening, drawing, paying attention so that I can indeed learn from them.  I watch the strong tall corn hold up the weakly-stemmed beans.  I imagine the bacteria in the nodes of the bean roots absorbing nitrogen from the air that will later be left in the soil for next year's corn to feed on.  I delight in the squash setting off on its meandering journey, setting down roots every now and again and shading the soil from water evaporation and the growth of unwanted plants.  I ponder my role and responsibilities as a human, as a youngest sibling and I delight in my place in the cirlce of the garden, in the circle of life.  The plants are excellent teachers and I am learning to learn from them as I silently sit at their "feet" where they transition from stem to root.

I

/The Three Sisters; corn, beans and squash have been planted as companions for thousands of years on Turtle Island by Indigenous Peoples such as the Haudenosaunee.

t seems that I have to understand who I am in this community of beings so that I can take that knowing into the community of humans.  I need to be rooted in that knowledge before I set off on my meandering path discovering my interbeing with others of my species.  I may be a senior adult but I am a novice at understanding my interbeingness, at understanding community.  Luckily, I have wonderful teachers.