Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7

0:06I have heard in the last few years a question rolling around the world. It goes something like this. How could you be joyful in a moment like this, in a world like this? And the question troubles me because it suggests that joy is a privilege. but joy in human life is a resilience-making, life-giving birthright of being human and to suggest that you can't be joyful in a time like this is akin to the idea that you can't be hopeful unless everything has gone right for you. Joy is a companion to hope as a wellspring of resilience and my wonderful teacher on this is Ross Gay, a poet and community gardener and teacher who brings his own way in to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us and we have to tend to that as seriously and as fiercely as how we tend to what is broken and what we're called to make better, what we're called to make more just.

1:22Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel, even and especially in experiences of great challenge. And Roske is infectious. His presence is infectious. I'm not sure that we used the word hope in the conversation we had, but hope emanated from it. As I said, he's a poet, and he's also a very intense lover and interrogator of words. His work actually reminds me of that Emily Dickinson quote that hope inspires the good to reveal itself. He told me that the etymology of the word delight is both of light and without light, which again drives at the deeper meaning of this that as he says adult joy knows that suffering and loss always live close by life and love and so and that knowledge brings what is good and joyful all the more into relief he actually works really interestingly with his community garden and the complex interplay that is in a garden between death and life and beauty and loss and pleasure, season after season after season.

2:44So the part of the interview that I want you to hear a little bit of here is about the practice he undertook to write his book of poetic essays called The Book of Delights. so what surprised you in the process of moving through that year and moving through that year looking for delight and writing about delight every day i mean many things surprised me i suppose um but one of the things that surprised me was how how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident. That was really quick, you know? And I wasn't sure. I was a little bit like, this is going to be hard to just have something delightful happen every day, you know?

3:35Yeah, you said somewhere it's like you developed a delight radar or a delight muscle. Yeah. Well, it seems to me it's a little bit, it's kind of the inverse or I don't know, the opposite experience from going to the therapist every week where you're kind of saving up things that illustrate your neurosis. And you were doing the opposite. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's fun. But what are some of the things that you noticed that you found delightful and called delight that you wouldn't have imagined before you started? You know, I mean, it just, like, occurred to me.

4:10It made me realize, too, how often I am delighted, how often things happen. Like, you were doing this hand gesture, and you were doing these hand gestures. I was like, I love hand gestures when you were doing that. I do them too, you know, with abundance. You know, I realized over the course of writing the book how much I love, I have a title of one of the pieces in there, but it's like unambiguous, how do I say it? Physical contact that is pleasant, you know, unambiguously pleasant. Yeah. Public physical interactions, I think is what I call it. You know, like I love how frequently I'm in the presence of like sweet little interactions that that don't have to happen, but do have to happen.

4:54I guess some some that I noticed, you know, yeah, just these ordinary things like seeing two people sharing the burden of carrying a shopping bag. Yeah. Or a sack of laundry. how they're helping each other and how their bodies are adjusting to you. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. It's an amazing thing. Yeah. But it's not until you say it's amazing, you know. It's like, whoa, that's amazing. We do that all the time. Yeah. I think sometimes about this phrase, you know, made my day. We have the power with our words and with all kinds of small gestures like that. I mean even like somebody being really nice in a checkout line or you being nice to somebody in a checkout line after the last two people were really rude to them and you watch a transformation take place that their day was getting broken what an incredible power we have to walk through the world making somebody's day yeah, just in a soft way it's kind of amazing there's also a lot of cafe runs Yeah, that's something too.

6:05Like I was like, man, I'm drinking a lot of coffee. There's a lot of like the vegan donut that you haven't even eaten yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's already delighting you, just the thought of getting to it. Yeah, totally, totally, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And also arugula and greens and garlic from your garden. Yeah, my garden. And it's funny because people, when they talk about the book, they notice the garden as like a primary feature. The garden is actually a character in the book. Yeah, yeah. And it didn't occur to me probably because it's so much, the garden is so much in my life, you know.

6:44You know, it's precisely the closeness and ordinariness of what Ross attended to that I think makes him a teacher to me and to all of us. And the invitation here is to play around with developing your own delight radar. There's nothing stopping any of us from making this daily exercise that he took on an exercise that we take on for some period of time. And I want to share something else Ross wrote that I love and drew him out on. It is a lovely deepening and a turn on a lot of the themes that have come through in this course about the importance of what we get proximate to and orient towards and devote our words to and put ourselves in service of.

7:40He said this,

8:10That's harder for us, it seems. This is the final session of this hope course for now. I hope you have enjoyed and been edified and sometimes delighted. Take some time to let it all settle inside you, inside your life. Maybe that's what the journaling will be about this week as well. And if you decide to pursue nothing else as follow-up, keep your delight radar on. This is, of course, a pleasant practice, but it holds such a profound, emotionally intelligent, resilience-making insight. that even as we know what frightens us and what we must fight and resist, what we must compost and hospice in this world that is not serving our highest humanity, even and especially amidst this hardness of being alive now, the muscle of hope calls us to orient around what we love and hold dear.

9:24the world we want to be part of making and nourishing. Thank you for being here, for being in the first place on the generative landscape of our time, for investing your life force already in the superpower of hope and its life-giving, reality-shifting force in our world that carries so much pain and so much promise. Blessings to you from me until we meet again.