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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