It’s important to be deliberate about joy when holiday contact has been flattened and we’re all locked in with few and sometimes wounded relations.
On Tuesday
night, I ran an all-staff, no-talent talent show for Roosevelt High School. I
know students have been isolated and sad, but educators have been too: for the
same reason I share with students a Zen at Ten half hour for happiness on
Wednesdays, I organized a talent show with health and community in mind.
And it
was so good—a joyous affair that included singing and guitar and poetry, cookie
deliveries and virtual eating, cat tricks, juggling, crochet and art shares, a Boomwhacker
arrangement of Rolling in the Deep, a dramatic reading of a
children’s book, and a stage-stealing pursed lip trumpeting of The Star
Spangled Banner, all in one neat hour.
Today,
the day between semesters, an hour and a half away from home, I slipped into a forest at
an unmarked pullout and followed the roaring sound to a perch over water
churning white, blue, and green. The ground was the soft overlayer of forest—needles
and moss and soft rot of wood and earth—until I came out on the slick rocks
over a dramatic river. At Eagle Falls, the river had kettled out round bowls in
rock while a boulder-layered wall lifted cedars on the other side.
By the time I got back on the road, I was buoyant and happy in ways I haven’t felt much since the lockdown and the car drove like a teenager’s.
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