JOY

We asked her: 

“What in your life is able to bring you joy? Is there anything

right now that inspires you? Anything that gives meaning to your life?”

Her response surprised us: 

“My birds.”

Joy. It’s a sense, a feeling, of well-being. Even in challenging times and moments. A sense of peace in the midst of turmoil. A feeling that things will be okay, even when they’re uncertain or complicated or hard.

For her, things were hard. Very hard. Life was tough. Very painful. 

But her birds, they gave her joy. They helped to get her through the trial, the tribulations that marked her life.

We wrote about her in our first book - Someone To Tell It To: Sharing Life’s Journey - 10 years ago. Her story always comes to our minds when we talk about joy and the absolute need for joy in our challenging lives.

You can read her story below. It doesn’t have the happiest of endings. But it shows how joy can lift our lives, comforting us, giving life a sense of purpose and meaning, getting us through our loneliness when life is tough. It also shows what happens when what brings us joy is taken away.

Where and how do you find joy? Or don’t you? 

We hope that everyone can find it and can experience it. Joy can be life-giving, life-enhancing, life-saving. 

Joy is something all of us need. It needs to be something all of us will enable and support one another to find. Listen, observe, notice - in yourself and in others - where joy comes alive and where life is good, even in the midst of what is not.

My Birds

(2014)

Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn

out the pain.

—Joseph Campbell

“It’s complicated,” she exclaims many times as we talk. “It’s

complicated, crazy, and sometimes I just can’t believe it’s happening

to me.”

She lays it out:

The surgery following an accident. The long hospital recovery. The rehab that went on longer. The mental fog caused by the pills and pain relievers. The four feet of snow that dumped on her home right after she returned from the hospital, isolating her. The sadness and hurt that came when no one called to see how she and her husband, for whom she is a caregiver, were doing. The hurricane that destroyed much of her roof and flooded her basement later that year. The two-year insurance red tape and bureaucracy battle that is still going on. The roof that is still not fixed two years later. The fault line that her home is on and the small earthquake that followed, shaking both her belongings and her spirit. The severe pain that never goes away. The alienation from her family members whom she believes callously ignore her struggles and offer neither support nor help. Her husband’s depression and seclusion.

She indicates that’s not all of it.

Yes, it is complicated. Deeply so.

Her loneliness is deeply felt. Her husband won’t talk. Her family doesn’t

seem to want to hear it. Her friends have quickly faded away.

She simply needs to talk, to share it, to try to give voice to the

disappointments, doubts, and dysfunctions of the system and those around

her. She’s trying, desperately, to sort it out and to find a way to keep going

in spite of it. It’s so complicated that it immobilizes her. Her life has lost

its hope. Her spirit has lost its faith.

We asked her, “What in your life is able to bring you joy? Is there anything

right now that inspires you? Anything that gives meaning to your life?”

Her response surprised us: 

“My birds.”

“Your birds?”

“I take in rescue birds. At one time I had twenty-seven of them at my

home. Macaws to parakeets. I just love them. Caring for them. Feeding

them. Nursing them back to strength and health. They are my joy.”

There it was—her joy. Those birds filled her with life, with meaning, with

purpose. Yet the sad—and tragic—thing was, when she got sick, there were those who wanted to take her birds away.

And they did.

Her joy. Without it her life held little meaning. If others would have taken

the time and been intentional about listening to her, really listening and

getting to know her, maybe they would have come to understand that.

All of us have something in our lives than can bring us meaning and

that can fill us with purpose. It’s not for anyone else to discount that. In

our listening we can help draw that out for each other. That's one very

important thing we can do for one another. It may have been a small

thing, but her birds were something. In losing them her world fell apart.

She needed those birds to help give her life.

Photo by Zachary Kyra-Derksen on Unsplash