Joy list

July edition

I’ve been a bit sad and anxious lately. It’s not a bad kind of sad, just growth-pains sad, but it’s been pretty uncomfortable nonetheless. Sometimes I feel I should wear a placard around my neck saying “Please handle with patience, I am growing a new human (and the new human is myself)”. Then I remember that this is true about everybody, all the time. We are all trundling about on wobbly legs, presenting our oddities and fears to the world in the shiniest packages we can come up with, hoping to be well-received. Being a person is a weird, fragile thing.

But being a person is also fun, and I could stand to be reminded of that (and you too, perhaps?). My post last week was long and melancholy, so in light of that I thought that this week I might give you a list. Here are some things that are giving me joy right now.

Trees

I started writing an essay about the wonder of trees, and about how much they’ve meant to me over the course of my life, then realised this was becoming more of a rant than a list. I’ll write a full-length post about them soon, I hope. For now, suffice it to say that trees are incredibly good at calming one’s nervous system, probably because they’re both solid and ever-changing. Tree-hugging is a thing for a reason.

These days I’ve been trying to hang out with a tree at least once a day. I take my cup of coffee and go and sit under the sapling where my dog is buried and look at all the birds flitting about. Every day something has happened – a bushbuck ate some of the sapling’s leaves, new leaves came out, a rogue tomato sprouted next to its trunk, the rogue tomato died, a nest of tiny rain spiders hatched, a small brown snake moved into the foliage nearby, an abandoned bird’s nest fell to the ground. And throughout it all, the little tree grows incrementally, thinking tree thoughts, breathing in and out.

Yesterday I came upon this poem by Mary Oliver, and I think it says it all:

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

(in my case, just replace the willow, honey locust, beech, oak and pines with yellowwood, stinkwood, crowberry, tree fuschia, white pear and wild pomegranate)

Unmindful walks

My favourite podcaster, Blindboy, talks about taking mindful walks, during which he focuses only on the experience of the walk itself: the smells, the sights, the action of putting one foot in front of the other. I enjoy a mindful walk sometimes, but if I stick to them too faithfully they can become just another thing on my endless self-improvement list. To remedy that, I love a good Unmindful Walk ™. Headphones, loud music of my choice, a nice long piece of road or forest path, and permission from myself not to pay attention to any of the wonders of nature are all I need for this. Angry walks, sad walks, and anxiety walks are subspecies of unmindful walks, and I am proud to say I often manage to fit all of them into a single excursion.

My friend Jess is a budding DJ and playlist master, and her playlists pair with unmindful walks as well as wine pairs with a good cry in the bath. I choose one and just march off in any direction, blissfully oblivious to barking dogs and passersby, and return remarkably cheerful, every single time.

Podcasts

People tell me all the time that they’d love to get into podcasts, but that they can’t sit still and just listen to someone talking for that long. To which I say, well, of course not! We live in the 21st century, we all have fractured concentration. Instead, I use podcast to get through tasks I wouldn’t enjoy much otherwise, mainly cleaning the house, or to make fun activities like cooking even better. Because of podcasts, I have been entertained, educated, and deeply moved more times than I can tell, all while washing the dishes.

My favourite, as I mentioned, is the Blindboy Podcast, which is a wonderfully weird weekly deep-dive into mythology, history, and ecology, with a good smattering of mental health advice, politics, and stories about cats on top. Because I struggle with anxiety, I can find falling asleep very daunting sometimes. Blindboy’s stories are interesting enough to keep my worried mind focused, and his voice and Irish accent soothing enough to lull me to sleep. I enjoy his stories so much, though, that I often find myself relistening to a single episode, picking it back up every evening where I dropped off the night before.

Another podcast I am really loving right now is The Emerald. I’m busy listening to the newest episode (the episodes are very long, which means cleaning + gardening + cooking) and it made me weep-cook last night. Meticulously researched and deeply moving, the podcast covers topics such as embodiment, the intelligence of nature, animacy, and spiritual seeking, with a strong mythological and spiritual focus.

Late winter

I am not a cold weather person. Our house is not a cold weather house. Seriously – in deep winter (i.e. now) I wear a scarf to bed, and up to three pairs of socks. But. But. A few years ago, after reading Michael Singer’s book The Surrender Experiment, I decided to try teach myself surrender by just focusing on accepting the weather every day. It has honestly been life-changing – it turns out I had been spending huge amounts of energy resenting every rainy day (and other things I cannot change).

Also, living closer to nature has made me appreciate all weather as not only necessary but interesting. I notice which birds migrate and when they return. Which spiders go into sleep mode, and for how long. Mushrooms respond to signs I cannot read and erupt at different dates with every annual cycle. Some trees bloom in deep winter. The sun sets at a slightly different place every day, highlighting different facets of the mountains in the process. Everything opens and closes according to this mysterious system, and the more I pay attention, the more there is to see.

This year’s winter started later than the last, but it has been a harsh one. We’ve had storms that felt like they would blow the entire house away (and did, for many other people). But the days have also begun to lengthen by tiny increments. The cold isn’t over, yet the sunlight is returning. The plants I pruned a month ago are sending out exploratory shoots. This morning I noticed that my African wormwood (artemisia afra, indigenous medicinal plant of note) started growing tiny new leaves directly from the woody branches I had severely cut back. My sweet peas and jasmine are tendriling all over the place, and I know that in another month they will be blooming. This feels like a time of faith: of putting young seedlings into the ground, of training the creepers, of adding compost to beddings, believing that it will pay off. It’s a sweet kind of waiting.

Tiny buds on my African wormwood

A few other things I loved this month:

Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher. A dark fairytale-fantasy novel, but also really funny. I loved it so much I immediately read five other of T. Kingfisher’s books too, and she’s immediately become one of my favourite fantasy authors.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Bailey, a gentle memoir about illness, nature, and the singular wonder of observing a single snail as it explores its world. This book moved me deeply, and also made me exclaim “nature is so cool!” multiple times.

The documentary film Breaking Together is a kind of follow-up to climate scientist Jem Bendell’s article Deep Adaptation, which deals with the inevitable changes that are heading our way. Neither the article nor the documentary are here to deliver good news, but there is an undercurrent of deep care and a focus on community-building there that somehow gave me joy.

Leena Norms is my favourite Youtuber. She’s British, fun, unabashedly odd, and very pragmatic. Her videos cover books, climate change, life advice, sewing (which I didn’t know I’d find interesting until I started watching her channel) and much more. Here’s a recent one I loved.

A joy shared is a joy doubled, they say. I hope something on my list gives you joy as well. And if you’d like, add some of your favourite things in the comments. Thank you for being here.