In the dark velvet heavens, the stars wink in sapphire blues and cool-fire lavenders.
My father and I stand in the empty cul-de-sac, looking up. We eagerly scan the horizon bejeweled with beguiling stars, searching for a soaring sign of the International Space Station.
It’s around 10:15pm, and the estimated arrival time is nearing.
So we wait … in giddy anticipation for a spectacular sight.
I catch a quick glimpse of my father, and I see child-like wonder playing upon his face.
My appreciation for the cosmos, for astronomy, for this splendid and mysterious Universe, comes from him, and this infinity for the stars and the workings of planets has been alive within him since he was a young boy.
As a child, his favorite toy was a telescope. He was the youngest member of an astronomy club (by like decades) in his hometown of Indianapolis, and though he professionally pursued law, his real passion has always been science.
He muses on physic problems for fun.
He works elegant math problems for the sheer enjoyment of it.
He relishes reading astronomy textbooks and theories on Black Holes just for the pure joy of learning and to simply be in the process of learning.
My father is a disciplined man. A hard-worker. A highly intelligent man. I call him “Google Gary.” I turn to him for questions on health, history, spirituality, current events, and Hunter S. Thompson and The Course Of Miracles quotes. He’s taught me reason, logic, objectivity, to question … and to look at the facts. He’s a great balancing act to my emotionality, and has always honored and praised my intuitive-feeling nature.
And he’s curated time within his schedule for his joys.
He takes breaks in his work day to expand his mind with those math problems.
He sits at the kitchen table and nurtures himself with steamed veggies and passages from The Elegant Universe.
He immerses himself in articles and studies on nutrition and health and then will pivot and re-center by marveling over snapshots of comets and the Milky Way featured in “The Astronomy Photo of the Day.”
When Jackie Kennedy (then Jackie Bouvier) was working at the Washington Times-Herald and interviewed her future-husband, then-congressman John F. Kennedy, she asked him what he thought his most important virtue was, quietly assuming he would say courage, since he had written a popular book on moral courage.
But he surprised her.
He said it was Curiosity.
These days, I’m curious about joy. I’m curious about how joy nourishes resiliency. I’m curious about why I don’t prioritize my joys … even though I know how essential they are to my overall wellbeing and to how I embody the change I wish to see within the world.
And that change … is really effervescent embodiment. Presence. Lovin’ being alive in my female body and emanating that inner harmony.
We know this … our romantic movies wink to it … when we don’t have pleasure, when our lives our lacking in sweetness, well … that rom-com just soured into drama/tragedy or worst … a horror flick.
I know that when I’m all honeyed up on the nectar of life, I am glowing and flowing and radiating high-vibrations.
I know this … but living this … hmm…. Different story.
A story that I become aware of recently when my marvelous life-coach (out of LA!) asks me what I do for fun? What lights me up?
And in no particular order, I ramble out …
~Reading
~Theatre – this includes, going to the theatre, being in a play, working in children’s theatre, working in some way that involves the theatre.
~Comedy
~Dancing
~Adventuring to local coffeeshops to write
“And how often do you do these things for yourself?” my LA life-coach brightly and intuitively asks from the Zoom screen.
I sit in stunned silence. The answer large and swallowing up the room.
“I’m not doing any of them …” I manage to confess, and then, because I am my father’s daughter, and I am a disciplined and a hard worker, and I know what I need to do.
I need to schedule FUN into the fabric of day-to-day routine.
So I weave reading into my bedtime routine. I break up/crack up my afternoons with Monty Python and A Bit Of Fry and Laurie sketches. I dance with my feelings (get those emotions into energetic motion) to favorite musical tunes (from “Grease” to “In The Heights,” from “Les Misérables” to “Hairspray”). I make a bucket list dream come true and sign-up to study Shakespeare in England. I adventure to coffeeshops in surrounding small towns and to local favorites … ordering earl grey tea or an Americano, depending on my caffeine level and musing mood.
Small actions.
Purposeful steps.
Each tiny and intentional YES strengthens my capacity to meet life, to receive life, to engage in life, and relax into the intelligent flow that is life. By softening into embodied presence, by choosing to cherish my heart and what makes my heart glow, I become attentive and appreciative of all the invitations life extends to me … you’re wanted here, come share your shine, and let this brighten up your shine.
And so the invitation from my father arrives over a dinner of sweet potatoes and buttered steamed veggies: to attempt a glimpse of the International Space Station, estimated to orbit right over our neighborhood around 10:30pm. There’s no guarantee, my father tells me. An overcast sky could conceal the station from our searching sight, but I feel that inner nudge, that choice point, to say YES, to chance out into the night … rain or starlight.
The night sky is clear. And the clarity of the sky cleanses my thought-whirling mind. My flip-flops high-five the pavement as I trot after my father who is looking to find an unobstructed view. We settle on the cul-de-sac, training our gaze right above the home of a defense attorney who every evening puffs on a cigar while walking his golden doodles.
His house, like all the other houses on the block, is dark and quiet. The doodles must be asleep or Netflix binging with their owners.
My father glances at his watch. The time approaches, but the space station appears earlier than predicted and anticipated. I point – up! to the determined soaring station that flies much quicker than a plane and is dotted with red and blue lights.
It’s less than a minute – but it’s a minute of complete awe. Together, we marvel in starlit silence.
This is my father’s joy – to keep the pulse on the happenings of space stations and space explorations, and when he chooses to cherish and pursue this joy, those in his micro-orbit benefit … like me, who if not for my cosmic curious father, I would be watching a docu-series on tennis on Netflix. Nothing wrong with that … there are evenings when this is my joy, and I also want to participate in the tennis match of life, not just watch others doing it.
This is a small moment, but my full presence is there. I am elevated and anchored. My consciousness expands to the universe and spirals to the very heartbeat of my own existence. I am pleasantly reminded of my smallness and my life’s significance.
Standing with my father, watching the space station arch over the far-off roof of our home, I offer up a wave and my heart lifts up a prayer.
It’s in the emptying exhalation of night that I can clarify my thoughts, can re-center in living in awakened presence, review why I am here, recommit to purpose.
We live in tense times.
This is what my father and I often talk about over those dinners of veggies and potatoes … we voice our concerns and our hopes for the trajectory of consciousness on our planet.
We’re looking at the bigger picture while being attentive to what is happening here on the ground.
We volley those Hunter S. Thompson quotes because he’s that old school 1970s “Water Gate” type of journalist who knew it was his democratic duty to question his government.
We’re diligent about choosing our joys, specifically curating space in our schedule for fun, because we’ve experienced the dark night of the soul.
We’ve both leaned too far into the dark abyss of news, and we’ve both teetered on the black hole’s ledge of mind-whirling “what ifs?” And joy is the starlight that beckoned our gaze to lift and move away from getting lost in despair or all-consuming fits of outrage. Joy leaned us back into the present wisdom of our supple and strong spines. We know our joy … the joy of simply being alive. And this both soothes and emboldens us to meet the dark, and be in our light as we do so.
And our dedication to that light contributes to the peace felt in the collective aura … of our family, our community, our nation.
Aligning with joy keeps the torch for civil liberties and human rights burning bright and strong.
And I’m just joining what reflective humans before me have too discovered. I recently came across a Substack piece by Dr. Naomi Wolf alluringly entitled, “How Not To Become A Sociopath,” and in it she too contemplated on joy and the role of joy in safeguarding democracy.
She writes about Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, pioneering psychologists in the early 20th century.
These esteemed psychologists rang the alarm bells about what happens to an individual, to a people when they repress or are denied joy, pleasure, and meaning … they become vulnerable and susceptible to seeking meaning in totalitarianism and participating in acts of cruelty.
Wilhelm Reich postulated that the German people turned toward Nazism to find meaning and purpose and to escape from the bleak impoverishment of post WWI in Germany. Sigmund Freud also cautioned that repressed pleasure can manifest in hysteria and neuroses. Freud knew that our inclination for joy is instinctive, impulsive, and powerful, and that energy will have to go somewhere.
And if this human instinct toward joy is dismissed, or strategically blocked by forces that demand and reward constant productivity, pride in busyness and achievement over health, relaxation and the cultivation of genuine relationships, then there’s a threat, a heightened uneasiness in the air, an influx of combustible tempers … along our roads, in lines at the grocery store, in the battle grounds of social media feeds, at our dinner tables, in our politics, in our growling thoughts.
So, choosing joy is like a direct dose of Vitamin C – for our own individual and collective immunity, to bolster the shine of our embodied effervescent, our inner felt-sense of liberation and emanating that radiance through our actions, words, deeds.
And most often, for me, what I am finding, choosing joy is dropping the mental narrative, softening back into the wild wisdom of my body and rising back up – from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head – alive. The joy of being alive, here, on earth, in this body.
So I wave to the astronauts for the joy of it. And I offer up a prayer as they fly on their way. And I cherish this moment, of star-gazing, of space-ship searching with my father on this clear summer night. It’s a boost of joy … one that continues to carry me as I journey forward through these wild and star-winking times.