~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
That the branches of bare trees erupt
with bursting buds simply because,
so they tell us, the planet’s axis has tipped
toward the sun, is one wonder.
A larger one, it seems to me,
is that we walk past, heedless,
hardly noticing such marvels at all.
What a fantastic world, where
miracles occur in such profusion
that we barely give them
a ho-hum!
Let me tell you how this letter came to be.
I was settled at my keyboard with the day’s chores behind me, relaxed and gazing at the orange and rose and turquoise sunset outside my window. My mind was leisurely scrolling through random topics when it paused on a shred of lyrics from the Moody Blues’ album, “Threshold of a Dream.” I hadn’t heard the Moody Blues in years!
I could remember some of the opening lines, but one phrase eluded me. So I zipped over to You Tube and listened to the track. I found what I was searching for, and as a bonus I got to hear one of my all-time favorite lines: “Face piles of trials with smiles. It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave. And keep on thinking free.” Good advice.
I slipped into a dream of my own while the song was playing. (I’ll tell you about it another day.) And when I came back to the music from my dream, I discovered several songs had played without my consciously hearing them. The one that was playing now was “The Minstrel’s Song.”
I listened, and the lyrics put into words exactly what I wanted to say to you today. I knew what it was; I felt it so clearly, but it just wasn’t taking shape in my mind. For one thing, it’s Easter. And my mind was contemplating all the interpretations of its meaning and symbolism, all the memories it evoked. And for another thing, it’s spring, and I’m enraptured by its wondrous unfolding. The mix of emotions I was feeling was wide and deep. And all at once, there was this happy song, capturing it so nicely.
I smiled as I listened. I pictured the minstrel wearing the harlequin costume of a joker, an April fool if you will, prancing down a mountain path, heedless of anything but the feeling of delight that filled him. But that’s just a disguise. You can imagine him any way that suits you. What’s important is his song.
Here’s how the first verse describes him: “Words, a simple song a minstrel sings, a way of life in his eyes. Hear the morning call of waking birds when they are singing, bringing love. Love. Everywhere love is all around.”
I thought about the joy I feel in the morning when I take seed out to the birds and they come to my song and we chirp at each other for a bit, and about how grateful I am to begin each day in their company, and how it feels like such a sweet breath of love.
Then the lyrics say that all the nations hear the minstrel’s song as he walks by in their lives. It touches us all. It sings to all of our hearts. And all we have to do is listen. “Listen to the one who sings of love. Follow our friend, our wandering friend. Listen to the one who sings of love. Everywhere, love is around . . . around . . . around.”
That was it exactly, just what I wanted to say. Listen for the love around you, because truly, it’s everywhere. It’s dancing through your heart this very minute.
And that’s the story of how this letter came to be.
Wishing you a week filled with the Minstrel’s song.
Warmly,
Susan
Before you returned, the waters were frozen,
the ground deep with snow. No songbirds
fluttered through the stiff, cold branches
of the trees. Everything slept in darkness.
Oh, the world still held its beauty
in a stark and subdued way. But nothing
foretold an awakening; nothing hinted
at renewal. Hope was a forgotten word.
Then, in you came, with your warmth
and your gold,your earth-shaking thunder
and life-giving rain, coaxing everything
to awake, pushing it to rise, luring it
into the light, inviting it to open,
giving it reason to sing, to shiver
with joy, to remember that
love never dies.
Clouds, darker than those that already veiled the morning sky,
drifted in just before noon, and the world stilled. After a while
a soft rain fell, washing the trees’ swelling buds, and the twigs
and branches and limbs and trunks, and finally the new grass
and the mosses and tiny spring flowers. It stopped about three
and I watched the sun emerge, pale through the clouds,
but giving its light to the sky behind them. Once, long ago,
someone who lived for some time in a woods, where he no doubt
learned the spirits of the trees, looked about him and asked,
“Have you noticed how the light is always perfect?”
The Yes, whose merest spark of thought
creates vast worlds within worlds,
whose living laughter flows endlessly
between and around and within them,
whose joy knows no bounds,
whose forces flow in our blood,
whose light sings in our souls—
that Yes—plays here, right in the midst of
this moment in Spring, and its star children
dance to the song.
When your time in the sunshine is measured in days
you have to make the most of every shred of them.
Hold nothing back. Release all hesitation.
Give it your best. Give it your all.
Beam out your light.
Trumpet your joy.
Do you know? Can I tell you?
How you fill our hearts with gladness with your song!
Just when you think dark winter
will never come to an end,
springtime arrives to bring you
the tenderness of tulips.
It’s not that the first ones are especially daring
or brave. It’s the song of the light
that calls them, the notes so sublime
they can neither be resisted or denied.
“Come: Here is wonder. Here is beauty.
Here is the destiny designed for your joy.
Come: drink the dew. Hear the birdsong.
Feel the rain; drink the fresh morning air.
Show the way. Paint the world
with your colors. Open your petals
to the sun. Join the grand chorus
of the exuberant, burgeoning Yes.”
And so they push past the last
layer of darkness and find the light.
And slowly they unfurl themselves,
amazed, and filled with gladness.
And they pick up the song, and
sing to their sleeping fellows,
“Oh, come! Come and see!
Come and dance with us
In the Yes of the sun!”
A week passed before I visited the eastern slope
of the southern hill again. The buds of the quince
are giving way to tiny green leaves. The baby ferns
are still asleep beneath the soil. But look!
The daffodils are open! Little patches of them
dance all across the hillside, glistening
with droplets from the morning’s rain. Where,
I suddenly wonder, is that one who came first?
And turning toward the mother spruce, I see her,
ruffled petals spread wide, beaming happiness
for all she’s worth. And what she’s worth,
it’s plain to see, is well beyond any measure.
I kneel and smooth a fingertip across her fragile petals
and we both melt in a connection of sheer joy.
One of my favorite things about owning shelves and stacks of books is that every now and then I’m inspired to shuffle them around. I find the most marvelous things that way. Take today for instance. I stumbled across Kenneth Patchen’s Hallelujah Anyway: A Book of Picture-Poems. My copy is a paperback, a bit tattered and worn. It’s been traveling with me since I bought it new in 1966, the year it was published. It was the title that got me. Hallelujah Anyway. Even way back then, that somehow said it all.
The drawings in it are childlike and the poems are painted across them freehand. But there’s nothing childlike about Patchen’s poems. If life hadn’t kicked him around some, he couldn’t have written this one – one of my favorites: “The world’s not enough really for the kind of rent we have to pay to live in us.” That’s it, the whole thing scrawled across the page.
It tastes bitter at first bite. But sometimes when its words happen into my mind I hear them as an expression of dark humor. Sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry. It can get that painful and absurd here. And laughter, however contemptuous, is still the best medicine. Dark humor’s better than none.
I believe in laughter. It’s like the crack that lets in the light. In fact, when I see one of life’s storms approaching from the horizon, I often send out an immediate petition for “strength and a sense of humor.”
But there’s more to Patchen’s poem than its attitude. It’s a blatant statement of the basic truth that the world is not enough to compensate for the suffering we endure here, living inside these human-suits with all these other humans and the insane situations that they manage to create. We deserve a lot more than the world offers.
Happily, more is here. Not out there in the world. But here, inside us. It’s the part of us that wants that Something-Greater-than-the-World. Something that would let us feel whole, and content, and at peace. Something that would let us love ourselves, warts and all, and give us eyes that would see everyone else as deserving of love as well. And its inside every one of us.
It’s not always an easy part of ourselves to find. We have to learn to listen, to recognize its nudge. Life, with all its complications, gets awfully distracting. But the wanting is always there. And it calls to us and says “keep looking.”
Patchen’s poem tells us not to waste time looking for it in the world. The best we’ll find there, and then only if we’re lucky, are teachers and random clues. But life’s genuine rewards – recognition of beauty, and goodness, and truth – come from the core of life within us. And when we find them, they bring such light that all we can do, despite the world’s pain, is shout out loud, “Hallelujah Anyway.”
Wishing you plenty to shout about.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Terri Sharp from Pixabay