Two mallards in a drainage ditch behind the suburban subdivision are diving and resurfacing in the murky water. They splash their shovel-shaped beaks and wag their tails. It is one of the first gorgeously warm days of the year, and if I had a tail, I’d be wagging it too.
Google tells me that ducks do in fact wag their tails when they are happy, that’s not just some assumption I’ve transferred from dogs to ducks. However, Google also tells me that ducks wag when they are excited, when they need to cool off, when they are sick, when they are mating, to shake off water, and to help balance their adorable waddle (i.e they wag their tails because they are clumsy little goobs). Basically, a duck can wag for just about any reason you can think of.
I can say with the utmost certainty though that these particular ducks in the drainage ditch are wagging with happiness, or delight, or maybe even joy. I don’t care if that’s anthropomorphizing. You can see it in their little duck faces. They are THRILLED to be alive. In a drainage ditch no less!
I can’t so much wag, but I can wiggle and bounce, which I do as I walk the path in shorts and a tank top soaking in the sun like a plant, smelling the decaying piles of alder seeds that litter the sidewalk like piles of waxy worms.
Google steps in again and tells me that each alder seed pod (or nutlet as they are wonderfully called) contains little air bubbles which allow them to be carried by wind or water to wherever it is they are destined to go. Some end up in the drainage ditch. Others plastered on the sidewalk. And a few, I’m sure, reach fertile ground. Each nutlet is ripe with potential, filled with buoyant joy that makes it possible to arrive exactly where they’re supposed to.
This sunshine, happy waggle, nutlet buoyancy on the edge of a suburban drainage ditch is a rare moment these days. Truthfully, life has felt exceedingly difficult for many, many weeks. Housing and home (that thing so important to my soul) continue to elude me. It’s frustratingly amazing that just when something like stability begins to materialize before my eyes, it just as quickly dissolves through my fingers (like the raccoon that tries to wash cotton candy). I am still borrowing space from the kindness of others, cringing at rental prices, and feeling severely demoralized by housing costs and mortgage rates.
New people I meet continue to ask where I’m based (a completely reasonable question) and I continue to name whatever town my feet are currently planted in. “Oh,” some of them say. “I thought you were in Arizona?” or “I thought you were in Washington?” to which I say I was and also in a way I am nowhere at all. And then sometimes when I close the Zoom screen or get back in my car, I cry just a little.
It’s not that I’m struggling with impermanence, but rather feeling like I have no substance whatsoever to lean against.
I’ve been having breakthroughs (breakdowns?) in therapy around feeling constricted. (Some days it’s more generally just feeling sorry for myself, which is an icky place to be). Despite finally making what I would consider a living wage, I still cannot figure out how to make it work. Zillow makes me want to gag. The rentals section of Facebook Marketplace makes me want to chuck my computer into a river. And all the insufferable “creative housing” Facebook communities make me deeply despise the human race. I just can’t shake the feeling of scarcity, that I will never know what it’s like to paint a wall yellow just to see what it feels like, or to plant asparagus knowing it’ll still be around to harvest two years later, or to confidently sit on a front stoop with the calm assurance that a landlord can’t sell the place out from under me with just 30 days’ notice.
In his book Inciting Joy, Ross Gay asks what would happen if joy was not separate from pain and I laid in a borrowed bed last night stunned by the idea of it.
“What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow,” he says, “but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?”
In that sense, I must be very close to joy. Because so many people are caring for me through my sorrow. And for that, I am grateful.
Gay goes on to say, “My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together.”
And in that way, the parents struggling with a child in rehab, the friend contemplating the end of a relationship, the family reckoning with mental health disorders, the loved one struggling with a chronic illness, the daughter/sister/girlfriend/friend desperate to find home, all together allow joy to emerge in a place where joy otherwise could not exist. We are drawn together in this shared place where joy and sorrow live together.
Our sorrows are the reason there are duck waggles and alder nutlets and gratifyingly exquisite warm spring days.
I first heard Anne Boyer’s poem “What Resembles The Grave But Isn’t” which she read at an event at Naropa College in Boulder, CO the year I finished graduate school and started my first, incredibly boring full-time job. Now I read it a few times a year when I’ve fallen into “the hole” that is not the grave but feels like it might be. The poem ends:
“...sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; … sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”
If joy is not separate from pain, then it must be the skill and spirit with which we rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t.
Dear Anja,
I wish you luck in finding a place soon. Hang in there. I enjoyed this essay, written with much thought.
Love, Grandma
Good stuff! I’ll have to take a listen to “Inciting Joy”. I just finished “The Sweet Spot, The pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning” by Paul Bloom. Although it focuses on self-inflicted suffering rather than the unsolicited sort, you may find it interesting.