Sacred Joy How to

Written By Diane Hicks

What do you hold sacred? What brings you joy?

Last year Marie Kondo was all the rage. Everyone started clearing their clutter. Picking up an old sweater or a tarnished necklace and asking, “Does this spark joy?”

Kondo created a movement of re-evaluating our clutter, forging a collective mindset of “less is more”. It became fashionable to downsize our lives. Of course, Kondo wasn’t the only conduit toward minimalism. She was perhaps the perfect predecessor to life in quarantine though. People had already begun their purge, discovering that getting rid of their junk had been almost as pleasurable as acquiring it in the first place. With time at home and many people off from work, the clearing of clutter took on new proportions. And then came the home improvements. My next door neighbor built the front deck his wife had been on about for seventeen years. Another guy down the road turned his front porch into an addition.

I didn’t have a lapse in work. In fact, I didn’t have my normal two weeks of vacation. I took off days here and there, but worked much more than I would in a typical summer. The joyful moments of summer were easy to find, sleeping in, taking walks, swimming and paddling, even rock climbing with my son once he’d gotten over his weeks long illness, which had turned out to be strep with mono, but not COVID-19, according to the ER doc. 

In summer, it was like riding the waves, but as the warm weather receded and the bursts of color faded to the all-too-memorable grays and browns of November, the palpable joys--the waves that used to rise up in between the lows of life in lockdown with headlines of political unrest, human rights violations and so on creating a treacherous undertow--flattened. 

And here today, that question of joy, of what is sacred even in the midst of so much that’s scary--sticks out of flat water like a stubborn shard of granite, as old as time.

Across spanning hunks of years, water can wear down rock to create smooth pebbles, even sand. How are we changed by life? It seems it’s happening right now and in a big way, perhaps. Of course, we can remember moments that shifted everything, and then we went on perhaps more fearful, or with a heart so heavy we knew a piece of us had chipped away.

This ocean of life keeps smoothing our edges. It’s not a peaceful process, like it seems it would be. It’s often a painful process. Of course there are sunny, summer days where the beauty distracts us and that wearing down is almost like a massage. And then there are these days, the gray-brown, chilled to the core days where the process is more like scraping away skin. We feel raw and blistered at best, injured and desperate at worst. 

Like that stubborn rock we are still here, and like that so smooth pebble drinking in the cool lapping of sea water, we are grateful, exhilarated, even perhaps breathless. 

I think that is called: Alive!

So, some days we exist to get to that next one and the one after where the sun comes out and we begin to unfurl again, soften again, let go with wild and reckless abandon even.

That’s sacred...And we don’t get there without feeling scared at points...or wounded or broken or hopeless, too perhaps. 

There is joy in being in this conversational nature with life. In noticing what is happening outside ourselves and within us, with feeling that place where the ocean meets earth, where our skin meets the air.

How to experience this joy? Begin with this breath.