protecting joy

The vibrant, expansive, outstretched tendril part of ourselves that moves us toward life

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Listen to me read this post.  

Thank God for Black Joy. The lifting up of this particular emotion – especially in Black bodies – is a reminder that the systems we all live within are threatened when we open toward what is expansive and life-affirming.

I was reminded of this today when I came home from dance class feeling frustrated.  The problem is that girl in the front of the room, I thought. She’s always up there. Always dancing perfectly. Never smiling. Never lost in the moment. She’s setting the tone.  Though we see each other week after week, we aren’t friends. In our class, there are good dancers (who get to be in the front) and then there’s everyone else. I’ve learned to let my dancing be “just for me,” but every so often I’m angry. We could support each other. We could be a community. We could be so much more.  It feels like we’re missing the point.

Maybe it’s naïve to expect that this group of mostly white, mostly affluent, mostly liberal women could somehow tap in to the connectedness that radiated from the BLM protestors doing the Electric Slide during the George Floyd protests.  I remember scrolling these images with delight, taking in what looked to be strangers rocking their bodies in sync to a song we all know so well. As I looked at the photos, it was as though I was dancing with them – my hands dropping to the ground, my head tilting over my shoulder as I rose up and grooved back, my eye catching that of a new friend similarly flowing in the ease of it, the togetherness of it, the joy of it. 

I believe our bodies are designed to move toward this feeling. If we’re lucky, we remember our first tastes of joy from childhood.  Joy was riding your bike ‘round and ‘round the block with your pack of friends until your mom yelled you home. It was being free from time and everything else while lost in your make-believe world. It was performing the dance you had just made up with your friends for your captive parents.  It was play, imagination, connection, and creation. Within joy’s halo, we expanded. Our “me” became an “us.” 

My niece on the skateboard my sister and I bought her for her birthday.

When we are in our joy, we are beautifully outstretched sea anemones. Our tendrils float in the open ocean. Light filters down from the sun and amplifies our vibrance. We are feeling. We are flowing. Without a hint of self-consciousness, we are a sight to behold. 

“When experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves,” says researcher Matthew Kuan Johnson.  

I’ve been ruminating about what happens to our joy in a society shaped by right and wrong and good and bad. What becomes of this vibrant, expansive, outstretched tendril part of ourselves that knows connection and imagination, and that is beyond the limiting constructs of the systems of extraction we live within?

Many of us learn to survive in these systems by swallowing our joy.  We tamp it down because letting ourselves be too alive makes us a target. I remember a moment of this distinctly in my own life. I was in the 4^th grade being silly and performing the Caramello song during a rainy indoor recess.  “Streeeeetch it out, out, out, Caramell-ohhh,” I repeatedly sang for my laughing girlfriends. From nowhere, a teacher I didn’t know approached me with dismay on her face. “You’re disturbing the entire 5^th grade class!” she admonished as if I was doing so intentionally. Before I could say sorry and promise to be quieter, this stranger teacher pulled me through the corridor that connected our classrooms and instructed me to apologize to a sea of roughly 100 older schoolmates. I was scared. On the spot, I learned to swallow this part of me that was so clearly incorrect. I placed the “J” and then the “O” on the back of my tongue and took a big gulp. The “Y” though stood its ground. This isn’t right, it internally shouted.  I addressed the room of expectant faces: “I’m sorry for disturbing you with my beautiful singing,” I said with a curtsy and a smile. “That’s not sincere,” the teacher reprimanded. “Do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” I meekly mumbled, and then shuffled away.

Our early imprints of joy go back before many of us felt the cold, inhumane, weight of systemic oppression shutting us down. When this reality dawns, it’s like the open floating sea anemone gets poked with something stiff and sharp. What my younger self learned was that being me was suddenly unsafe.  Allowing too much me to come out meant opening to shame and ridicule. After this experience, I learned to finely attune to what was “acceptable” in any room. Over time, I stopped trusting joy’s calls toward connection, expression, and play and looked to others for validation of my acceptability – my belonging. 

Something interesting happens when we learn to swallow our joy. In the belly, swallowed joy forces us into our minds. We begin to embody the systems of dominance we’ve been abused by. We learn to solely trust what “makes sense,” and discount the watery intuitive guidance of our bodies. Some of us are brave and try to make space for the truth of us by rationalizing with the powers that be. We come to our places of employment or education with studies and articles proving the benefits of x or inarguable values of y.

We learn to speak the language of domination to make a case for life hoping if we say it just right, the truth of us will be granted a little more room.

But systems of dominance aren’t interested in giving us more of anything – especially if that more might challenge their position. So, they trick us. They say yes to joy. They say yes to celebration. They say yes to the body, so long as everything stays in place; so long as we uphold the hierarchy.   The unfolded sea tendril, electric slide doing, singing for silliness part of you? Well, she’s dangerous. She’s naïve. She’s too experimental. She’s untrustworthy. So we learn to contain our joy within the box the system has designed for it.  We become the student at the front of the dance class prioritizing the steps over the simple pleasure of moving. We become the angry student just behind her afraid to claim the spotlight and delight in another way.

In these moments, it’s good to remember the whales.  

From the patio of our Airbnb just north of Sayulita, my partner and I watched as they breached over and over. Mouths jutting. Fins slapping. Water cascading. We felt the echo of their weighty bodies as they hit the surface, in our own chest and belly.  In awe and gratitude, we wordlessly watched. There was no need to ask, “what are they doing?” In the air and in our own physicality we could feel the joy. 

The deck where we watched the whales breach.

It took only moments for the nearby fishing boats to turn on their course and head toward the direction of these magnificent playmates. “Whales at such and such coordinates,” I imagined them radioing to each other.  The boats arrived and encircled the water of the whales’ last sighting, but they had gone under. Went quiet. Their joy was for them and no one else. When the boats went away, they reemerged just as unapologetic, just as alive. It was a navigation they seemed familiar with.  

The whales don’t swallow their joy, they protect it. They protect their need to be their whole selves and this makes them powerful and magnetizing. I believe it is the same for us humans.

Protecting my joy, protecting my need to be my full human self is what I’m relearning how to do these days. Maybe the dance class is not the safest place to let the me of me loose. Maybe I contact my joy in moments when she knows she’s not going to be sized up and examined.

On Monday morning, a day that reeks of productivity pressures, I took my dog to the backyard as I normally do. She sniffed and did her business while I checked the Dahlias for new blooms.  In the rosy morning haze, I caught a V of Pelicans way, way up, gliding north on a current. Maybe going to Alcatraz island to fish, I thought.  Then, buzzing around my head, a hummingbird landed on the passionfruit vine. I know this particular bird. With some humor, I’ve watched this summer as he takes to the sky and then dives down toward the vine looping over and over again to claim his turf. In this moment though, just a foot above me, my eyes locked with his tiny black beady ones.

Then, there joy was. She wasn’t a belly laugh or a skip and a jump. She wasn’t ebullient. She was a warming in the belly, and an expansion that underscored the interwovenness of it all. Away from my devices and feeling somewhat flippant about my email, I had energetically put out my “do not disturb sign.” In this space, joy crept forward and said, “Here I am.” She held me there in the ordinariness of her, the no-big-deal-ness and I became bigger. Standing in the garden in my house slippers and oversized sweatshirt, it was as if I was leaping and splashing from my watery home. Just another day. Just another part of me that is true. Just a moment of communion.

My wish for all us is that we find these moments in the mundane — the walk around the block, the quiet moment with a cup of coffee, the private dance party in the living room — and as we reconnect with this fullness within us we remember our own radiant power.

Notes:

• Join me for Women of Color Movement Mediation on Oct. 12th. This is a free space for women of color to deepen their connection to their own body wisdom with the support of a kind community. Learn more about this space.