Laughing at the world

Grateful for long walks, falling off the trail, and remembering.

Snow decorated by my twelve-year-old daughter in the backyard while I was inside staring at a computer/writing this.

“You’re happy",” Alex said.

“I’m always happy,” Sasha said. “Sometimes I just forget.”

- Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Dear Readers,

For those of you who reached out to me after my recent health scare, thank you. Truly from the bottom of my heart, Thank You.

Two weeks after a trip to the ER, I can report that I seem to have come through my (first?) bout of shingles unscathed. There’s the occasional twingy-tingle on my scalp and some insurance paperwork to manage, but no shadow hangs over my memories of New Orleans. It was a week defined by beauty, lightness, and joy.

Before I hit ‘publish” on The Things that Happened at Mardi Gras, I forgot to think about how the story would land, probably because I just didn’t think the whole thing through as a public announcement. The text messages and calls and comments that came immediately after publication, and in the days since, have caught me off guard. Your words of concern have been kind and meaningful, but also remind me that stories are important connective tissue for all of us.

I wrote the story up for myself, as I have been doing for so long that I don’t really know how to quit. The bins and shelves of journals filled with my loopy scrawl are growing heavy after 4+ decades. With you, with Wanderlife, I’m testing the waters to see how it feels to open the books and expose myself.

A bulleted list of medical information started at Urgent Care and continued at ER are now part of my written history, but more interesting to me at this point are the pages and pages filled with quotes about happiness, laughter, and levity.

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit,” I wrote down while reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer, as well as the quote about remembering to be happy above from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I also wrote this quote in my journal:

“Humor is something I learned. It becomes a practice to take things as lightly as possible. So much of our culture encourages us to take things heavily and to dwell on things, not wear them lightly, not shrug them off. I want to laugh at the world as much as I possibly can.”

- Katherine May, interviewed by Jane Ratcliffe at Beyond, where writers are invited to talk about what it means to be a heart-centered human in a hard world.

It seems to me that this was what Mardi Gras in New Orleans was trying to say. Take this life a little more lightly. Laugh at the world. Humor is good medicine for the trials and troubles of living in a body while moving through a messy existence.

Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat During Difficult Times is a special book. It seems to have somehow bloomed into a crack in the broken sidewalk of the world as a message we all needed to keep ourselves afloat during the tough times of a global pandemic. After reading the interview on Substack, I was convinced that her newer book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age would be equally timely. I walked to the local bookstore as soon as I got home.

I’m probably not the only one who needs reminders to laugh at myself and the world.

There is a set of questions you may know, or have heard about, that serve as an invitation to self-reflection on a path toward the light:

When was the last time you danced?
When was the last time you sang?
When was the last time you told a story?
When was the last time you sat alone in stillness?

There was a stretch of about two years when my week started with dancing and singing. In those days, on Monday evenings I’d eat a light dinner with my family, then bike the few blocks to the community center for a dance class. The teacher was a charismatic and passionate woman who took the time to bring disco lights, as well as a bumpin’ playlist, to make each class fun. Regulars greeted each other with high-fives before spacing ourselves around the room for an hour of aerobic dancing to pop music.

Afterward, I’d run to the basement bathroom to peel off my sweaty clothes and redress before biking to a church-turned-private-resident to sing acapella folk songs with a community choir. There in the calm lights of the art-filled nave, people sipped tea and stood in a circle, settling into their bodies and preparing for a collective exhale.

Let’s be clear here: I am a gangly middle-aged lady with no history of memorizing choreographed dance moves and I’ve been told to stop singing my whole life. I don’t even understand what it means to hear notes. So this dancing-singing thing was all hilarious in the best way possible.

Then the global Covid-19 pandemic canceled all gathering, all classes, and all kinds of freedoms.

My beloved Monday-evening ritual came to an end.

That period of life stands out in my memory as a time when I felt truly free. Singing and dancing were a wonderful way to experience the happiness of being alive. And I was old enough and wise enough to appreciate it. It was my first taste of the wisdom that purportedly comes in the later decades of life: Comfort and contentment. Humility and grace.

But it wasn’t just me. We were all of us having so much fun together! When I run into people from dance class or community choir, we reminisce about the good old days.

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When was the last time you danced?
When was the last time you sang?
When was the last time you told a story?
When was the last time you sat alone in stillness?

I’ve been told that wise healers use these prompts to work with people who are depressed, overwhelmed, and generally dispirited. I find them provocative and helpful.

“We need to find a way to have those softer emotions present in life now. We need joy. We need pleasure. We need wonder and awe. Even more than that, we need to feel this sense of magic that flows through the world…the important thing is to engage with your magic and let it sustain you.”

- Katherine May

My Monday Ritual, these days

For over ten years, I’ve been writing a list of ‘Gratitudes’ on Sunday nights. I’ve committed to sharing some of that here, as a new Monday ritual. I’m taking time before the work-week starts spinning to give my Sunday night scrawls another look and a little more thought. I’m guessing that putting them into the world ‘to be seen’ is maybe akin to why some folks show up at church. Perhaps individual intentions, like those proverbial butterfly wings, can flutter through the collective consciousness and we will all fall under a spell, for a moment, grateful for the magic flowing through the world.

Note: A reader recently told me that it felt like trespassing into private space to read my handwritten diary. I appreciated that insight and I hope the VoiceOver helps.