writing, joy and blue days

 

“Joy is not made to be a crumb”

and/or “joy in not made to be a crown”

both fragile certainties make sense to me. Although, I confess, there are times where I want some joy so badly, that I pray to gods without names, if they could please throw me some rests of it. It does not need to be much, just enough for me to forget this pain for a minute or two.

Other times, I wear my joy as a crown, I become one of these annoying moms that simply assume that people appreciate advice about how to live well. I think I developed it as a mechanism to desperately try to make my joy last longer. It never works. I often end up alone and empty, sad, having to pretend that the crown was still there when it had already vanished to the other side of the moment, unreachable.

Writing at times gives me joy. Other times simply gives me space to be. Like today. It is a gray and rainy day, inside and out. I am mourning the end of a relationship that I am not ready to let go. I am terrified of what will happen if I let change enter my life. I tried to hold on the doors and keep it out. But the truth is that that is an impossible mission. I can not really close the doors of my life to change. It comes from all the sides, under the broken window, on the shoes of guests, on the blank pages that I carried inside the house so the kids could paint dinosaurs, flowers and faces. Writing gives me a place where I can vomit all my pieces. At times, I am not even aware of the existence of such bits before throwing them up. Writing gives me a home, or almost it.

In our writing circle last week L. reinvented how one can relate to the old question “where are you coming from?”. It bothers me how obsessed we learn to be in this statistic world about the places where someone is born. We often throw the question “where are you from?” on strangers, as if they had an obligation to explain what they are doing here, why do they have the right to come here. We forget the aggression that such question carries. It is norm, that in small talk with strangers we always ask where she is from. Then L. suggested something different. Share where you are coming from today, emotionally, what did you do, how you are feeling, anything that you consider relevant. It was like, with that very simple gesture, she was deconstructing what does it mean to come from somewhere. She was removing it from this context of statistic politics and the states’ almost absolute right to exclude and bringing it to a light reflection about the conditions of existence of humans.

I found it beautiful and insightful. Such a question reminds us that we are always moving from one place to another, sometimes inside ourselves. I was coming from a blue day, I remember. First, I became blue. Sometimes blue takes me over almost like a wild dance, that at the same time that swipes me from my feet it gives me a marvelous high. Other times, it enters my life like a mad and violent monster, hungry to break me for good. That day it was the second kind.  By know I now that when blueness comes like this it is best if I put on my walking shoes and leave the house. It was what I did. After almost forty minutes walking it became easier to breathe again. I decided to sit on a bench and write a bit. It was then that I noticed that precious hour in which the day itself shift into blue as well. Between the mountains I could see the integrity and the power that knows how to inhabit even the bluest day. I dried my tears and smiled to the day. It had just reminded me that beauty can find its place among pain. I walked a bit lighter, blue, but also joyful, without a crown or crumbs, I simply walked grateful for been surrounded by those that still insist in remembering that perhaps “beauty can save the world”.

a hug and until next time