Safe Passage for Happiness
These are dark days. Here, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun pushes into the sky well after 7:00 a.m., and midday, the sun already looks like it can’t wait to hide back in bed, disappear from view. I use my “happy lamp” to keep back as much clinical depression as possible, but as someone who is especially prone to feeling the sadness of the whole world, I know my lamp is essentially the equivalent of a starfish holding back the tide.
I wrote a sad book with lots of sad poems—themes of grief, climate change, and lost women fill the pages. When I was working to order my manuscript, part of my challenge was finding poems to break up the sad ones so that my readers would have a chance to surface from sadness with poems that offer something lighter, more humorous, more hopeful.
At one point in my book creation, my mentor, Gretchen Marquette, prescribed me a task of writing exactly 100 words each day about a joy from that day. So, in the style of Ross Gay, I tried. It was hard. I wrote some sad and angry poems about how stupid the assignment was and how pointless it is to be cheery. And then I wrote some poems about deep and regular joys, like watching my child learn to swim each week alongside other disabled people or how he whispers to himself while building a castle of boxes, wearing a homemade crown alone in our basement. Joys so deep they ache, and, like Ross Gay, I still snuck sadness in there along the edges because it just isn’t possible to write about our bright joys without knowing they are temporal, without the shading of grief.
“And the way I think of joy—not only does it not exist absent sorrow, it actually requires sorrow to exist.”
Forced cheeriness is painfully acute for me during this season of smiling, plastic Santas and tinny music shrieking joy to the world in each big boxstore. I don’t want anyone telling me how to be happy…especially when happiness is equated with consumerism. But, I also don’t want to shut myself off from the many offers of happiness that come to me each day. I know that being sad can be protective for me and that joy and hope feel naive and risky.
My child building a Christmas castle while wearing a Thanksgiving crown
One phrase that I keep coming back to, especially during this season is the idea of “giving safe passage.” This Advent season, I have been meditating on the journey of the Magi, how their journey took them through darkness and danger, how the clarity of truth and light kept them on the trail, how they committed to the full, embodied experience of the journey themselves. This is a story of earnest seeking, faithful walking, of hope and despair and confusion, and of great joy and adoration.
I can approach my writing with the mindset of giving safe passage—of committing to the truth in whatever I am working to say, not trying to force it to go a specific direction but following its lead, protecting its path. I think this is a way to allow more hope and joy through while also keeping room for the sadness.
And maybe this is a way to approach life, too. Maybe there’s a way to see every emotion (even the glad tidings ones) through from start to finish. Maybe it’s a really risky journey worth taking. Maybe my next book will be “happier,” maybe not, it doesn’t really matter, I think, as long as everything true gets to come through.
