I read this Mary Oliver poem eight weeks into COVID isolation and it struck me. I’m noticing that I suddenly and unexpectedly feel depression, and frustration, and every once in a while suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy. I love the idea that not hesitating when one is experiencing joy is a way of fighting back. Not of fighting back in a way that’s against the depression or frustration, trying to make them go away, but a way of fighting back that says joy is also available, that adds joy to our current palette of experiences. I’d like to remember Mary Oliver’s thought that joy is not meant to be a crumb. In my personal Alexander Technique practice this week I’ve decided to practice allowing joy to be more than a crumb, to notice when I habitually diminish joy, and to practice pleasure not as a salve or distraction or glossing over but as a radical statement of resilience and resistance. I hope that in among all the other parts of your experience these days, you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy.

Be well,

Lyra

DON’T HESITATE

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.