Practicing Joy

Hello, dear readers. It's been a while. I've been writing a lot this year, but mostly that energy has been funneled toward songwriting. I'm really enjoying it, but today it feels like it's time for a blog post.

Every morning (or almost every morning), I draw a tarot card for my day, not so much as a predictor of how the day will go but as an idea of an energy I can ground into or check in with throughout the day, or something I might want to remember. I keep the card in a little stand on my desk so I see it regularly as I go about my day. For the last six weeks or so, I've also been pulling a rune every day, as I'm trying to learn more about that particular tool, and I find it interesting to see how the card and the rune might be in conversation with each other.

This morning, I pulled the 8 of Wands from the Yukika Tarot as my card, and Wunjo as my rune:

I usually think of the 8 of Wands as ideas in motion. But the guidebook for this deck takes a slightly different approach, and it's one that I really like. Stasia Burrington, who created the deck, talks about the patient practice of a ranger learning to use their bow. The phrase that jumped out at me the first time I pulled this card and looked up her interpretation was: "To practice till the actions come easy."

Wunjo, the rune that looks like an angular letter P, is the rune of joy. Siri Vincent Plouff, in their book Queering the Runes, writes of Wunjo:

This is also Wunjo: accepting ourselves as an ecstatic part of nature, accepting ourselves as who we are. My desires are just as valid as anyone else's. That shouldn't be a radical idea, and yet somehow it is....Joy is a radical feeling for queer people and people of color. In a society that has long profited from us keeping our heads down and not making waves, our joy is a sacred rebellion.

So, this card and this rune in conversation, taken together, ask: "What would it look like to practice tapping into joy until that action comes easy?"

Joy can be a hard thing to access these days. The Horrors persist, and they're truly horrific and heartbreaking. Much of the world is literally on fire. The people with the most power to affect systemic change are either sitting on their hands or actively using that power to make life worse for everyone else. That is all real and true.

And...a thing that I have learned (and am continuing to learn and re-learn daily) as I have moved out of more fundamentalist religious spaces is that more than one thing can be true at once. There is horror and grief and rage, and I hold all of that. And yet there is also beauty and love and joy, and I hold all of that as well. It can be overwhelming to hold it all at once, yes. But learning to tap in and out of all of these realities, to give each of them space, is a thing we can work toward.

In a lovely little bit of synchronicity, numerologist Bee Scolnick wrote in their newsletter that came out today about practicing writing Joy Lists. Bee describes this practice as "a present-tense practice of attention and gratitude, a heart-guided meditation that can actively lift your spirits as you write, and a reminder of the tools in your toolkit, which you can call upon the next time you need a pick-me-up!" Back when I was blogging regularly, I would often default to lists like this for posts if I wasn't sure what to write about, and I can confirm that it can be a really lovely, supportive practice, especially when things feel so hard.

So, in the spirit of listening to the Universe when it's being loud, I'd like to practice tapping into joy today. Here are five things that have been bringing me joy this week:

1. There was snow on the ground when I took our husky, Nova, out this morning. Not a lot of it, but enough to cover much of the grass. Nova's delight at the snow means that even when it shows up in April (when I'm kind of ready for it to be spring), it feels joyous: how can I be upset about it when she's so excited?
2. Yesterday I went to a day-long, mostly silent, LGBTQIA+ meditation retreat with a friend. We got a ride there with a friend she had met going to the same retreat last year. The conversations in the car there and back (it was about a 90 minute drive each way) were so beautiful and enriching, and I came away with a new friend.
3. Going into the meditation retreat, I was a little nervous, because while meditation was a daily part of my practice for a long time, I haven't done it in over a year. (It had turned into a thing I felt like I was doing just to check off a box on my to do list, so I set it down.) I've wanted to get back to it, but I've felt a bit intimidated. But while we were sitting in the silence, I had the gorgeous experience of feeling my body, whenever I got distracted, asking me to come home. The realization that my body is home, that it's a home I feel tenderness and love toward even if it frustrates me sometimes, felt like a revelation. I may not be permanently in this place with my body, but I'm here more often than not these days, and that feels huge as a queer, trans human with a history of major struggle with my body.
4. Earlier in the week, I had some conversations with loved ones that were hard and scary to initiate. In the past, I would have tried to start these conversations in writing, because that's how I feel most articulate, and I was so worried if I couldn't articulate precisely where I was coming from, I'd somehow cause these relationships irreparable harm. But even though the conversations were hard, they went well: everyone involved held each other's feelings with such curiosity and care, and left space for the discussion to continue. It made me so happy to be reminded that I have people in my life who will catch me if I leap into the unknown.
5. This week was the start of a new session of songwriting classes! This time, my partner is taking the class with me, which we haven't been able to do in years, and which I'm really excited about. One of our classmates tried out a new name for the first time in our first class, which was such an honor and also felt like a good omen for what might unfold over the next six weeks. I think it's going to be a really great group and a really generative space for all of us!

I hope you're all hanging in there despite The Horrors, and that you're also able to find moments, however small, to practice joy this week.