Notes from the Hatch: On Joy

Sunday, January 26, 2024

Martin Johnson Heade, Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871)

Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. Welcome to the Hatch! Below, you’ll find everything you need for this special hour—our reading, a few prompts, some sonic accompaniment, and a link to the Chat, where you can connect with other Hatchlings and share your writing with us all.

Much love,

Carmen

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Today’s Readings—

From On Being with Krista Tippett

“I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”

Via the comments section of today’s newsletter, originally in “Between the Covers” podcast with David Naimon

“When I’m talking about joy—and I like to say the word grave—because when I’m talking about joy, I’m talking about something that is informed, fundamentally, by the fact that we’re going to die… One of practices of joy is to be walking with that understanding perpetually with us: This is changing, this is changing. What a kind of sheen to the world to be like, this very well might be the last time that we are together.”

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Opera Singer by Ross Gay

via The Poetry Foundation

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief 
that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil 
dragging from my neck as I swim 
through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,
which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry 
snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion 
worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say: 
I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means. 
 
And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café, 
and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket 
as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No, 
I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness 
in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise 
when my self-absorption gets usurped 
by the sound of opera streaming from an open window, 
and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl, 
and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the 
delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue 
which means a language more beautiful than my own, 
and I don’t recognize the song 
though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s 
breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me 
two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch 
leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face, 
staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee 
and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention 
the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers, 
some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers 
and training wheels and nearly trampling me 
when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress 
blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway 
and friends, it is not too much to say 
it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea 
and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles 
of love and every name of the unborn and dead 
from this abuelita only glancing at me 
before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby 
and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding 
makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here 
and tell you I said thank you.

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To Brood is to Wander Through a Grove by Rumi

From Water (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)—available for pre-order

To brood is to wander through a grove 
where one sheep strays 
and a hundred wolves follow.

Why did I make brooding my vocation
when awe was an option?

Thought spinner,
mull the wine of wonder.

Your prompts for today:

Option One: Mull the Wine of Wonder

“Thought spinner/ mull the wine of wonder.”

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Option Two: On Moons and Birds and Other Artistic Preoccupations (From the March 2022 gathering of the Hatch)

“There is a time for everything… I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.”¹

Write about the promise of spring. About what’s possible. What you’ll see and hear and feel. What is soon to be.

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Option Three: What Gladrackets You (from today’s newsletter)

Write about what gladrackets you. Exalt whatever is both necessary and beautiful, be it a plant or a poem, a philosophy or a practice. Praise what is wonderful, to be adored and preserved, like seeds for the long journey.

The Isolation Journals Chat: Hatch Edition

To connect with other Hatchlings and to share what you wrote and thought of during this session, click here!

Further inspiration—

Some sonic accompaniment—

1. From Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letter from Love last week: “…springtime does not necessarily signify youth, no matter what your culture may claim. Springtime signifies renewal. Springtime brings the hopeful budding of new leaves — the early stages of what will ultimately be a tremendous, beautiful, and generous bloom.Trees of all ages have seasons of springtime, my dear. A tree could be 500 years old and still be putting forth fresh buds every year. And so can you.”