spin with joy.
Today has been all about family and spinning with joy like Oliver's roses. We spent the morning opening presents and having breakfast quiche with our kids. Then I took a little nap before heading to my sisters' house for lunch and more present opening. Ham and cookies. After the last gift was unwrapped, we sat down to play board games.
And the world was green and foggy, nary a snowflake in sight. One of the warmest yuletides I can ever recall, with temperatures in the forties.
It's going to be difficult going to work tomorrow after all this food and family and happiness.
Saint Marty's Christmas essay for Public Radio this year was all about joy . . .
Joy
to the World
Joy
is elusive.
I
have a poet friend who’s been chasing it for years. Hers is an albino whitetail that haunts the
woods and cemeteries and trails around our town on the shores of an arctic
inland sea. Ever since she moved here,
she’s longed for a close encounter with this scrap of winter, its marble
haunches and swan neck. I often wonder
if, when she sees it, she will burst into blossom, shudder into glory like a
peacock.
Another
friend, a physicist, searches the heavens for joy, magnifies with binoculars
and telescope the shadows of lunar craters, blurs of comet tails, flashes of
Geminids flinting through December stars.
When he finds it, will he blaze like an aurora, an emerald waterfall at
the birth of night?
Still
another friend listens for joy in the green cantatas of birds, The whistle of
Black-capped Chickadees, rubber-ducky squeaks of nuthatches, weirdo-weirdo-weirdo of cardinals. I imagine when she finally hears joy, she
will bristle into down and plume, leap into flight.
The
poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as
they are in the same body.”
I
often think of joy and grief as best friends climbing the hills of Croagh Patrick
in Ireland, hiking the miles of the Camino through Napoleon Pass in the
Pyrenees. Every once in a while, they
sit down and share a lunch of foraged raspberries or blueberries, perhaps at
the edge of a field studded with grazing sheep.
They listen to the bleats and baas, fill their mouths with wild, sweet
wonder.
I
have known joy in flesh and blood. Have
written poetry with her. Gobbled
kumquats with her. Sat around a fire
with her, telling stories of dying sisters, Bigfoot rambles, Christmas, and
cormorants. Joy’s name was Helen.
Helen
was simultaneously tiny and huge, containing multitudes. The first time I saw her, sitting in her
English Department office, legs pretzeled underneath her, speaking with a
student about his essay, I thought to myself, “She’s a Sandhill Crane, gawky
and graceful.” When she saw me standing
in the hallway, she smiled . . . no . . . she beamed at me, waving both her
hands, as if one hand wasn’t enough to communicate her excitement.
“Troy,”
she said to her student, “this is Marty,” pulling my name out of thin air like a
magician. The Great Helini. We’d never spoken before. “He’s a wonderful writer and teacher,” she
said. She’d never read my poems or seen
me in a classroom. “And,” she said,
“he’s my good friend.”
That’s
what joy does. It takes you by surprise,
appearing like thunder snow or a wedge of Snow Geese in a November sky. Something so ordinary and so astonishing it
stops you mid-breath and, forever more, you are changed.
Helen
always spoke in metaphor. In a world of
calculus and physics, she embraced the unknown, unknowable, transformed them
into oceans and moonlight. When I was
struggling with the loss of my mother a few years ago, Helen texted me, “I want
to be salt air, wild raspberries, Bigfoot strength. I want poems to flow . . . I hold you in love
. . . I hold your mom in love.” For Helen,
a hummingbird was the finger of God; the Mediterranean, a teardrop.
As
I sit writing these words, snow has begun to fall outside my window—big, thick
flakes that look like a riot of Snow Buntings.
It will soon stop, I’m sure, because nothing so joyfully beautiful can
last long. It appears, slaps you in the
eyes, then vanishes like a comet to the other side of the galaxy.
In
2020, the comet Neowise returned to our neck of the Milky Way for the first
time in 6,800 years. June and July, it
was visible to the naked eye, a cosmic checkmark in the stars.
Wonder? Check.
Beauty? Check. Joy?
Check.
Helen
and I became comet chasers. The first
time she saw it, she texted me, “I saw Neowise in the V between the trees
across the street. What a wonderful
bedtime blessing it is!” Eventually, she
chased it to the top of Jasper Knob near her home, gazing into the heavens,
stunned and undone.
Me? I climbed to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain
one night with my family. As I stepped
onto the summit, my head pointed upward, I tried to orient myself, searching
for the Big Dipper. I knew that, once I located that constellation, I
could easily find Neowise. It took only a moment. The sky was milky
with stars, and there was the handle and pan of the Dipper. I imagined a
stream of water cascading from the pan in an arc (not hard to do with the sound
of Lake Superior's surf in the dark below). At the base of that arc was
Neowise, a smudge of powdery light.
It
was a moment almost 7,000 years in the making. I stood there, mouth
open. I felt connected to something much
larger than myself. The last time Neowise appeared in the sky was roughly
5,000 years before the nativity of Christ. The wheel had just been
invented. Farming was a fairly new innovation—having only started in Mesopotamia
around two millennia prior. The woolly mammoth could have seen Neowise,
but not any of the pharaohs. The Egyptian civilization wouldn't appear
for another 1,800 years. No pyramids. No mummies. Hammurabi
and his code weren't even a twinkle in the universe's eyes. The Trojan
War hadn't been fought. Homer wasn't singing. And Rome wouldn't be
built for almost 5,000 years.
And
there I stood, in the middle of a global pandemic, gaping at Neowise the way, I
imagine, those mammoths 7,000 years ago never did. They simply went about
the business of eating, sleeping, moving, and mating. Meanwhile, that
smear of light kept climbing away and away. The mammoths disappeared, and
humankind took over, with its stupid need to explain and dissect and define.
Helen
was a magi that summer. So was I. Following a star. Filled with hope and joy.
The
snow has stopped outside my window now, those icy Snow Buntings settled into
hungry flocks, eating the ground and sidewalks.
As I said, nothing with such beauty and joy lasts forever.
Helen
died a year-and-a-half ago, on a late August Sunday filled with light and
warmth. Two weeks before, she’d phoned
me one last time.
“Marty,”
she said, her voice both weak and strong, “I’m ready.”
I
sat with the phone at my ear, took a deep breath. I told her I loved her. Told her how much joy she’d brought into my
life. How she would always be a shining
part of me. A piece of polished sea glass. A gift.
“I
love you, too,” she said. “I’ll be with
you. Always.”
This
Christmas, winter is late in coming. The
maple across the street is still clothed in rust-colored leaves; patches of
green grass, still visible beneath a thin dust of white. As the days grow shorter and shorter, solstice
approaching, I think of a snow-white deer in alder and pine. The flash of cardinal against a sky so blue
it hurts the eyes.
And
I think of Helen, shaking with joy, shaking with grief, dancing through the
constellations, following Neowise to some distant Bethlehem on the other side
of the universe.
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