The Joy Connections color series 10-day challenge I was facilitating through my Subtle Harmony site ended about a week and a half ago. It was helpful to notice, even more than usual, what brings me joy.
I posted my joy-connections photos on instagram every day.
The above are some of my photos I posted to my instagram on the days for green, pink, black, white, and blue.
Paying attention to, noticing, being aware of connection to JOY … as it relates to the beauty of color.
♥
And sometimes I need this just to simply make it through the day. (Because sometimes simply making it through the day is hard – and doing only that is enough.)
There’s a difference between happiness and joy.
You’ve probably heard that before, but do you really (really and truly) believe it and feel it?
Joy can definitely be there in a happy time.
But joy can come unexpectedly, seemingly out of the blue.
And joy can be there even in the dark and the difficult.
I remember the morning my grandmother died, a sunny August day in 1997, and my husband and I walking in our neighborhood after getting the phone call, and talking about our plans for making the trip to my hometown for the funeral, and how it felt so surreal and so sad – that this woman who was a second mother to me, caring for me and my brother as both my parents worked fulltime as I was growing up, was no longer on this earth… and at the same time, along with deep grief and sadness, there was joy too.
Unexpected. Inexplicable. But… yes, joy.
I remember the evening my father was transported by ambulance to the residential hospice facility for his last night on earth – again in August, but this time in 2013 – and after spending time with my parents in my father’s large and beautiful-but-awful room, we finally left to have a late supper, me and my husband and my brother and my nephew, sitting around the table at a fast-food restaurant while we ate chicken wings, exhausted and feeling unreal while laughing at the lovely absurdity hardness of life, but sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying (and crying can be a good and needed thing, but sometimes the laughter is what carries us)…
And even as my heart was splitting open and breaking apart – as it had been doing for the many months leading up to that night, that weekend of my father’s passing – and even in the moments of stunned surreal silences and the moments of laughing with loved ones…
Joy was there too.
I could feel it, beneath the sad and the raw and the numbness and the unreality-of-it-all: joy, holding a spot in my heart, a beautiful aching and a wonder of how joy can co-exist with pain.
I’ve known times of such intense anxiety I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t go on, times of such depression I couldn’t get up and couldn’t see a future, times of such uncertainty I didn’t know how a path through could appear…
And then a pocket of joy would come, give me grace, help me hold on.
As I said, joy can catch us by surprise.
But along the way, I also started to realize that when we cultivate joy, when we intentionally and consciously try to connect with joy… it can be easier to notice joy and catch the joy when it shows up.
Sometimes this can be in a sort of dramatic way. But often this can be in small, even quiet, ways.
And this is why I so often talk about connection with joy, when I talk about soul nourishment and self care… Because making the decision and the choice to consciously and intentionally try to connect with joy whenever possible and in whatever ways possible – it truly can make a difference.
Will it make life perfect? No.
Will it mean there won’t be some incredibly hard stuff and difficult times? No.
But it can help.
We become more aware of those pockets of joy. We notice when there’s an undercurrent of joy beneath the pain and the hard. We open to embrace the grace that joy brings. We catch the joy, we live in that joy moment – and it can help us hold on and help us get through and help us live more fully alive.
Life can be so hard at times.
But it also has such beautiful, grace-giving joy.
Being aware of the joy that’s there truly can make a difference in life. ♥
Late Saturday night, feeling distracted and unsettled, I picked up the remote and started clicking through tv channels.
I was stopped by Austin City Limits on PBS, James Taylor singing and jamming with his band.
My heart immediately lightened as I listened to the music.
~~~~~
You’ve got a friend.
It’s the early 70s and I’m riding in the backseat on the long drive across the state to drop my brother and his friends at a church retreat before my parents and I spend a few days exploring Jekyll Island. I’m too young to join the teens at camp – our five-year age difference puts my brother in high school while I’m only in elementary school.
I want my brother and his friends to think I’m cool and interesting, but I’m shy and tongue-tied. As usual, I’m the invisible little sister. The quiet one. The weird one.
I listen to the radio as the road unfolds in front of us for hours.
Music is one of my best friends.
~~~~~
It’s our song, she tells us as we sit around the table at Pizza Hut. One of our songs, I mean. He said it reminds him of me, and I said it reminds me of him. And it does, It really describes how we feel. We make each other smile, you know?
She’s talking about James Taylor’s Your Smiling Face. We’re in high school, a group of girlfriends out for pizza and a movie. The rest of us nod knowingly. We’ve seen our friend and her new guy, the two of them smiling and laughing together, their blond heads close.
I love the time spent with friends but the high school years are difficult for me, for many reasons, and I’m not-so-secretly looking forward to the next phase.
~~~~~
It’s 1987 and I’m in grad school, immersed in writing a paper that’s due the next day. I study and work best with music blasting and my thick hair piled on top of my head, which means the radio is blaring in the 1-bedroom off-campus apartment I share with my black cat. I move back and forth between the typewriter on the old wooden desk I refinished several years earlier when I was a freshman in college, and the papers and index cards spread all over the floor.
Coming around again.
Carly Simon’s latest song is playing and my body sways to the music as I sort through notes for the paper I’m writing. I moved out on my own when I was 20, living in a tiny apartment in my hometown, finishing college and working various jobs. But grad school is my first time living in another state, away from family, moving there alone with my sweet kitty.
I have a blond-haired guy of my own now, we’ve been together for a few years, and things are rocky with us at the moment. But although my romantic life is shaky, my social life in general is full and fabulous to an extent like never before.
Do I realize that I’ll always think of my grad school time – even decades later – as one of the best times of my life?
~~~~~
I love this movie, I say to my husband as we snuggle on our couch watching Sleepless in Seattle on video. It’s the mid-90s, we’ve been married for several years by now, and we recently left apartment living to purchase a house. I didn’t marry my blond-haired guy from earlier years; my husband’s hair is dark-almost-black, one of the few physical indications of his Creek ancestry.
Carly Simon sings In the Wee Small Hours while Meg Ryan, as Annie, gets out of bed during the night and goes downstairs, her thoughts on Tom Hanks’ character, Sam.
I nestle into the cushions even more, cozy and content in my own home, with my own love, watching the movie.
~~~~~
The songs on the Tapestry album are embedded in my life’s personal soundtrack. They are interwoven with my years, part of the literal tapestry of my life. I played my LP so much it was scratchy; I played the cassette so often it was worn.
I think of those songs, memories of decades flashing through my mind, while I watch James Taylor sing on the screen.
I feel his music lift my spirits even more. And not only that, the music grounds me. It brings me more fully to center, more completely into my body.
Even as the memories pass through, I can feel myself in the present and enjoying the moment.
Enjoying the music.
~~~~~
By the end of the show, my mood was in a much different place than when I first picked up the tv remote.
Music can do that.
Music is powerful.
And so are memories.
Ginger Simpson White 
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