Joy Comes With the Morning, Again

The fragrance of plums and nectarines hangs heavy in my kitchen this morning. It brings me to joy. 

Joy was hanging heavily in my thoughts last night as I went to bed. I wrote late, after a long day and evening at work, and my prompt, which began with noticing slight improvements in medium-sized frustrations, carried me into remembering joy. It's one of the lovely surprises in following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion. 

I went to bed with joy and woke with joy and remembered last year's writing about joy and am reminded that joy is choice. A perspective. We see what we expect to see. There's been a lot of research into that lately. I think of Pam Grout's little book E-Squared. I read it at a time in my life when everything was falling apart. Every day I expected to wake to more bad news, to more losses, to more things to grieve. The little experiments in her book helped me to shift my perceptions, to shift how I see. They may be little, but they are fierce in their teachings. 

And I still see gold cars every time I go out. 

They make me smile.

We're in a heat wave these days in southeastern Pennsylvania. My bowl of nectarines and plums has been sitting on the counter for a couple of days while the fruit ripens. With the urging of sweltering air, the nectarines were tipped at the edge of fermentation this morning. So I cut away the spoiled bits and cut the rest into a bowl and instead of eating them one-by-one over days I'm going to have to eat them as a feast. That's how joy works. Out of what first appears to be difficulty, challenge, sorrow, or desperation, something shifts, and what was hard becomes suddenly wondrous and juicy and sweet. Light instead of dark. Vitalizing instead of draining or dispiriting. 

As I put the bowl of freshly cut nectarines in my fridge I notice an abundance of fresh produce I've collected as the week has gone on. Corn on the cob in the husk. Asparagus standing tall in a small jar of water. Half a cantaloupe turned upside down on a plate.  Half an avocado dressed in its unused piece of skin. Brilliantly hued red pepper and orange carrots. Lemons, limes, a pear. My creative mind begins to play with ideas of good food to eat. I shift my gaze to the bowl on the kitchen cart - organic sweet potatoes from the farmer's market, new potatoes, sweet onions, garlic. I am surrounded by goodness and nourishing things. 

Joy comes with the morning, again.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.

Photo by Dan Cain. 

The story: Two images greeted me when I signed in to Facebook this morning. One, of the North Carolina rally and the president leading a crowd in hate speech and the other, this gorgeous image of a hummingbird in the desert taken by Dan Cain, an brilliant photographer who lives in Borrego Springs, CA and hikes the back country capturing extraordinary images. He finds them in his garden as well, which is where I think I read this image was captured. In the morning. We're inundated with images and stories every day - which ones will we take into our day and allow to shape us?  I'll take this one any day over the other and I feel fortunate to understand I have the choice.  

I see the embodiment of fierce joy in this image. In ancient indigenous Central American cultures, hummingbird is the heart warrior. Cultivating joy is heart warrior work, so I'll allow this image to inspire me to spend the day taking in the nectar and chasing away those beings and things that would prey on my joy.