Recognizing and acknowledging each other’s true nature and worth.
MONADNOCK AREA: Leaf Seligman’s experiences in her bio include “jail chaplain, prisoner educator congregational minister, college instructor and human being. She facilitates peacekeeping circles, immersive learning experiences, and restorative processes of accountability, healing, and transformation.” Her new book, Being Restorative, published by Bauhan Publishing 2024, introduces us to restorative circles, darkness and light, heresy, ruminations on a restorative response to war, and finally, why we deeply need to keep joy in our lives.
I spoke with Leaf over Zoom for an hour, listening and learning as this teacher explained concepts that we all can use in our lives. In the book, she writes, “Everyone I know has experienced some form of trauma, some shade, some hue.” It is for this reason I am presenting this article in the form of questions and answers, and it is packed with answers. She talks about both/and which Psychology Today says that “you can and almost certainly will feel more than one thing at a time, You can feel both exhilarated by a high-powered position and overwhelmed by the sacrifices that it demands.” If you’ve experienced trauma, this article is for you. Please note this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Please explain what restorative is.
A: The simplest way I know, to explain it is to say that when we’re being restorative, we are moving closer to being in right relationship with all beings, to the best of our ability. In some ways, it’s inherently aspirational and given because we live in the both/and. For me, that feels really like a foundational truth, that we live in the both/and, not an either/or. I have sort of distilled it into we’re moving toward right relationship, or we’re not. And I get the and is that sometimes it’s hard because I think there are times where I may feel I’m moving in a direction of right relationship. And for me, that would mean as much as possible bearing in mind all the beings, so not just human beings, botanical beings, and arboreal beings, all the beings, all the generations, not just this moment, but am I moving to a right relationship with the descendants, with seven generations out. So that’s a lot to hold every single moment. I think about someone like Adrienne Maree Brown, who talks about emergent strategy. The idea behind emergent strategy is, as the name would imply, that the strategies emerge moment to moment, that we’re open to questions that we’re living in curiosity that we’re working with what’s fluid in the moment, and not sort of fixed on an outcome that we have in mind. I think that informs my sense of being restorative.
Q: Does being restorative tell you, this is where you need to be just pay attention to the now?
A: It’s not just in the now. For instance, if I do something that has an impact on future generations, I think about environmentally or climate-wise. We’re imperfect beings in a kind of imperfect context. So they’re always balanced. I’m getting on a plane Monday to go to a restorative justice conference. Ecologically, is that the right thing to do to get on a plane? A plane is gonna fly anyway. But it’s gonna fly because people like me get on it. Am I going to balance out the damage it does not just today, but in future generations, given the impact of carbon? Is that going to balance out my presence and whatever I can contribute at that conference? Every day, we’re all living in those kinds of decisions. And so for me, being restorative asked me, at least to be present to the complexity of it and to just try to be mindful and go, okay, so in this moment, with the information that’s available to me, or with the level of self-awareness I have, this is my best guess on what I think, and feel will be the right thing to do. That’s part of it.
Q: How did you find that path?
A: I feel like I was born into a restorative path. I grew up in an immediate family, my mother, and father in particular, I feel both people emulated lives of service, often lives of service to those who are most marginalized. So I felt like I was sort of steeped in an awareness of injustice, of systemic racism, of all kinds of marginalization, and I was aware of it as a very young child and bothered by it. I actually feel like I’ve always kind of been on a restorative path, to be honest. I didn’t use that language when I was younger. And I look back, though, and go, yeah, my whole life kind of primed me for this.
Q: Tell me about your name, Leaf.
A: The story my mother would tell, were she here, would be that she was looking for a word a single-syllable name, but something with an element of nature. She liked the word leaf because a leaf is singular. She said it was a singular element of beauty. You don’t have leafs if there’s more than one leaf that changes to leaves. So there’s only one leaf. She really liked that. And she felt that had to do with her love of nature. Father would have said, I think my mother told me this, but he was playing around with trying to find a derivation of either his mother or his grandmother’s Hebrew name, which was Leah. He was trying to find a name that was a derivation that might use the first consonant, the first sound, the L, or the LE. That’s what he said, he was just putting different letters on the end of Lea. And so Leaf worked but I always go with my mother’s version because it feels better.
Q: What is the circle worldview?
A: The circle worldview, I learned from Kay Pranis, who is my mentor and that’s who I learned peacemaking circle work with. Kay and her colleague, Carolyn Boyes-Watson, distilled really, what’s just 1000s of years of indigenous wisdom into seven core assumptions of the circle worldview. I’m not a fan of the word assumptions, so I call them foundations. And when I looked at the circle worldview, which is an indigenous worldview, I realized that’s a restorative worldview. It isn’t new. It just really hues toward most of the Indigenous teachings that have been around for tens of thousands of years, how to be in right relationship, balance, and reciprocity. Understanding that all beings are sacred, that we are to be in right relationship with all the beings and consider the impact of our actions, seven generations forward, and that kind of worldview that we’re interdependent, that we are related. Everybody is my relation. We’re not the same. We’re related.
The reason it’s called circle worldview is there’s a particular kind of peacemaking circle that has this worldview. The work of Kay Pranis has been to take indigenous circles that indigenous people on Turtle Island, in North America, have used, people in New Zealand, M?ori people, all people living across the African continent, have gathered in circles, often around fire and have shared stories and have created an understanding of what might be just and right and how to address harm and their communities. They’ve used a circle to do it. What Kay’s done that’s been important is that she’s taken those practices and tried to translate them into language and practice so that people who don’t live in those cultures and aren’t steeped in that worldview can understand. The idea is that there’s this circle worldview, which is those seven assumptions or foundations. I was raised in a worldview that’s completely opposite of that. That’s hierarchical, that’s absolutely linear around time and space that is not based on reciprocity and mutual wellbeing. It’s based on profit; it’s based on hierarchy. It’s based on who’s more valuable than whom, it’s based on outcome, all kinds of stuff. What Kay did was asking people to sit in circle who aren’t used to sitting in circle and sharing the time and space equitably. That’s challenging, that’s new for a lot of people. And so that’s why I incorporated the worldview. It feels like, you don’t have to sit in a circle to experience that. But for me trying to have those values in the world and sort of carry what I call circle values everywhere I go. I need to remember that’s an unfamiliar concept for a lot of people and to offer some grace around that which is unfamiliar and not everybody’s used to when I pull out my little talking piece and say, okay, let’s circle up.
Q: Do you think it’s a patriarchal place that you came from?
A: Oh, sure. I think it still is. I mean, I’m sort of intrigued with the fact that, just as a political observation, Kamala Harris now will have to choose a running mate. I’ve heard lots of pundits say, well, which white guy will she choose? It’s not that Gretchen Whitmer wouldn’t be great. It’s that everybody sort of acknowledges, well, two females on the ticket, how would that ever go? And I’m thinking, we had two men on the ticket since the beginning of this nation’s founding, with the exception of the last three and a half years, and nobody thought, I don’t know, can we have two men in the top seats because half the population is female. So that wouldn’t be very representative. Right? And it seems so crude, but I’m like, well, that feels pretty patriarchal, to me, that people are out loud willing to say, well, she’s got to pick a guy, and she really needs to pick a white guy too. Because don’t be too threatening, two people of color? Well, to some of us, it wouldn’t be an issue. I feel like I still live in a patriarchy.
Q: She’s got to get a swing state, and that’s somebody that’s a white man running in a swing state.
A: I understand all that. And I still think most people would say, yeah, she’s not gonna. There are probably capable women in swing states. It’s just always interesting to me that maleness remains kind of normative.
Q: One of the tenets of the circle worldview is that all humans have gifts, and everyone is needed for what they bring. What gifts do they have or how do you define these gifts?
A: I chose to include these seven foundations I didn’t make them up but what I like about that one you just mentioned, all humans have gifts, and everyone is needed for what they bring. I talk about Robin Wall Kimmerer in the book where she talks about having the humility to understand that human beings are late to the show that indigenous people think of humans as the youngest relations on Earth and what’s been helpful for me about reading her work, though, is that she does talk about the gifts that human beings can bring. And it’s easy for me sometimes, in my more sort of misanthropic moments to go, oh, are we a scourge on the planet, humans, we make all the mess and, to go, wait, because she has instructed me that we also bring gifts. I think that in the same way, I could name some people I won’t, but I can certainly name people who I would have a hard time identifying what gifts they bring, that I need, or feel that we collectively need. Some people with a lot of political power or are aspiring to have a lot of political power, I might go, not sure I can find a gift that they’re bringing to the party that I really want. So for me, it feels kind of aspirational. And it sort of ties back to the first foundation, which is the true self, and everyone is good, wise, and powerful. And so I write in the book, and I say, our behavior doesn’t always reflect our true self. Sometimes we act from the parts of ourselves that are not the true self. They are the parts that may have adapted to trauma, have adapted to great pain, and have become that which no longer serve us, although we believe that they do. I’m not saying oh, everyone’s behavior is wonderful at all. I’m saying absolutely the opposite. We exist on a continuum of harm. I’m a well-meaning person, do I cause harm? Sure, hopefully not grave harm, but I still cause harm. And so I feel like I believe that humans have gifts. And it’s important to be curious about what the gifts are, and could they bring them and use them differently. So if I take a person whose behavior challenges me, I would say Bibi Netanyahu is at the top of my list today, I imagine that he has gifts, that if he had applied differently, we might find helpful.
I spend a fair amount of time with folks who are incarcerated and people who work in the prisons. I don’t work for them, I just go in. But they’ll often talk about how these people are so ingenious if only they can apply their ingenuity to something positive. For instance, people in prison, out of necessity, learn how to make interesting food out of just the crap food they can find in the commissary, but they’re very creative, extraordinarily creative. And of course, they can figure out how to make stuff out of nothing, because they have to. There are programs, they’re entrepreneurs who go into prisons, and there’s a whole program where entrepreneurs who have been very successful in a capitalist world come in, and sort of work with the entrepreneurial gifts of people who are incarcerated and say, okay, now let’s focus that towards sort of legal and maybe socially beneficial endeavors, maybe not a crime ring or a gang or something like that. And so I think of it in that way, that we all do have gifts. And I do believe that how we choose to manifest those gifts, if someone is particularly manipulative, I’d kind of be like, oh, that seems kind of icky. But then again, I think, Oh, well, what if someone manipulates for the greater good? You know, somebody is a really slick talker, and they somehow have gotten this foundation to give oodles of resources to incredibly needy beings. Well, in that case, I liked that. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s useful. If I hold that foundation as a possibility. It invites curiosity. So if I meet someone and go, what does this person have to offer humanity? I have to go okay, well, I’m the one who put this in my book, so let me be curious. What gifts does JD Vance have? Actually, I think JD Vance is probably an intelligent human being. Perhaps he could use his gifts differently. That doesn’t mean he will. But it’s just I think, for me, it’s just a frame to imagine the possibility. All of those foundations require me to have some humility. I, Leaf, can’t see anything good and wise in Bibi Netanyahu. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, it means I don’t have the capacity to see it. There’s a difference. I want to live in that space of humility. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to say I’m highly critical of his political and military choices. I get to be as critical of that as I want. It just doesn’t mean I am the final arbiter of what, somewhere in him is there a self that is good and wise. Probably there must be I don’t know. I don’t know that everybody accesses it in their lifetime.
Q: You have a chapter titled Heresy. The first line of this chapter is, “Our first experience in utero is one of profound and literal connection. We begin our human journey embedded in the body of being of another who is not other at all.” Would you talk to me about heresy?
A: We are all born of someone. By the end of it when I talk about the heresy is to experience parts of the Divine Light embedded in the heart of every stone and our own stony hearts, without taking a maul to either. Maybe that is the sense of heresy. It feels like the heresy I live within most often is the idea that we are not connected, that we are disconnected beings that we are individuals that we are separate from. And I think that’s why I started with; we actually are. Our first experience in utero, I can’t speak to if there’s some experience, pre-utero, is this literal connection, likely, we literally were cells and we grow inside a womb that’s connected, that we’re in the body and we are part of that body, and the blood supply, and we share and all that stuff. So we start in this profound state of connection. And then we’re born and then it seems like there’s this idea that, well, you’re you and I’m me, and we’re all separate and what we do is intricately, and inextricably bound to one another. To me, the heresy is thinking for a moment that it’s not, that both/and part of it is that the connections are complex. They’re not always easy connections. When I talk about in that short chapter, the heating with wood, for me, trees are sacred beings. For me, they’re my ancestors, my living ancestors. They’re my teachers. For years and years, I prayed to trees. And then when I started heating with wood, I had to struggle with what it meant that I’m burning these beings with a body of beings that I consider divine. And it was like, oh, that’s an interesting relationship, to think about the connection and think about the energy of the trees and the lumber or the wood, their bodies in my woodstove literally coming into my body like the heat transferring into my body. It’s sort of like, well, there’s this connection, you know, my exhalations become part of what the trees breathe in, and I’m sitting here on a wood chair, in a wood-framed house, which requires the death of the beings I consider sacred. And I can’t get around that.
Q: But the indigenous people would have burned wood. They’d eat animals.
A: That’s where my friend Randy taught me in the chapter about relational ethics or restorative ethics is that it’s the relationship itself, not the being in relationship. So what he would say about that is, I can be in right relationship with the tree, whose body I burned, the rightness of the relationship is that I understand this is a sacred being, who is offering their life for my sustenance. And if I receive that gift, and try to offer reciprocity, not necessarily to that individual tree, but back to the Earth, that we are in, we all belong through my goodness, or my good actions, or that whatever I’m doing, that I’m in right relationship with the tree. That makes sense to me. That’s kind of where I had to come to, is to say, it’s the relationship, that I want to protect the rightness of the relationship and to understand that then is an individual being. Robin Wall Kimmerer helped me not to feel horrible about the fact that the way human beings are made we are not made like trees. Trees and plants can take sunlight and convert it to sugar and their bodies, you and I cannot do that. So we have to consume the bodies of other beings might be animal bodies, it might be plant bodies, but we have to learn to live. And that’s just kind of how we’re made. And that sort of liberated me to go okay. That’s how it has to be. So for me, the question is just can I be in right relationship with those beings whichever beings I choose to consume and anyone else? For me, it is about do I notice the beings, do I appreciate the beings. Can I be in respect? I feel like it’s an imperfect world. I try, in the book, I mean, well, and harm happens anyway. And I always try to have some mindfulness about the other beings that keep me alive.
Q: So how do we meet in darkness and light?
A: I sort of feel like that’s how we meet all the time. I’ve been a jail chaplain a couple of times, and the first time I was a jail chaplain, I did it for a year but little over 20 years ago. And I sort of said to myself, my job is simply to go in and try to reflect the light in each person I sit with, try to find the spark of the divine in everybody and reflect it back and if I can’t find the divine spark, that’s okay. But that’s kind of what I thought my role was just to try to reflect it back and sometimes the way one sees a spark, it’s a cliche, but if I’m in a dark room and I light a match, it’s easier to see the little flame than if we’re in full sun. There’s a line I use in the book, which came from a wonderful friend of mine, Margaret-Love Denman, who said, that her daddy told her that we walk in all the light we have. I sort of changed it to We travel in all the light we have, because somebody pointed out to me, we don’t all walk, right? So we travel in the light and often we don’t have sufficient light to see where we’re going to move closer to right relationship. If I’m moving in darkness, literal darkness, and I don’t see you, Beverly, I might inadvertently bump into you and I might knock you down. And whether I mean it or not, if you fall down and you crack your teeth and get a concussion, the impact is there, whether I meant to or not. My deal is, well, it won’t do you much good to curse the darkness. If you don’t want me careening into you, you might say, can I cast more light? Can I help create conditions that allow for there to be more light in the shared space or to encourage me to have some responsibility and say, Leaf, part of the reason you crashed into me is there was a light switch that you passed right on the way in the hall and you didn’t turn it on? So I mean, there’s room for personal agency in this. I feel like I’m most often illumined by acknowledging my own darkness, and it’s been in places that people think of is sort of metaphorically a kind of darkness, where I’ve experienced the most illumination, which for me is people who are imprisoned. I think prisons literally often can be pretty dark spaces. If there’s a light, it’s fluorescent, so it’s harsh. And so for me, that can also be a place of great illumination. It’s made greater because there’s a context in a place where it’s profoundly dehumanizing when I can go into a place that is designed to dehumanize other human beings, and I can meet people who are so humane and compassionate in those spaces, it’s like the light is even brighter. It illumines me and I think that’s kind of what I mean about it doesn’t have to be that way. I feel like sometimes people talk about how we’re living in dark times. I don’t always equate dark with negative at all, I think I love the idea of fertile darkness, that the womb is dark, underground where plants grow and seed and sprout is dark. So darkness for me can be profoundly generative and beautiful and fertile. When I’m using the metaphor here, of where we meet in darkness and light, sometimes I’m thinking about the darkness being quite fertile, that we meet in those fertile places of, say, that great line about, is it the darkness of the womb or the darkness of the tomb. I think we often meet in places where the darkness and the light intersect, and so I guess for me, there’s a kind of usefulness in naming that. Because I guess I’m hoping to remind folks that we don’t just meet in one place or the other, it’s kind of both/and.
Q: You want that flower you’ve planted in the ground to grow; you’re going to put it in some dirt and you’re going to cover it up and attend to it and wait for it to produce something beautiful.
A: I’m not trying to in any way romanticize the experiences or the oppression or the hierarchies that I might connect with sort of, in quotes dark times. I’m just aware there are traditions of people who make such beautiful light and possibility and life in times that are extremely demanding. I guess on an individual or a personal level, I think about the times in my life that I will say were weakest. I’ll move away from the metaphor of dark and just bleak. It is bleak right now. It feels like surviving. There’s something about being able to get to a place where we can sort of pause and look and kind of look back and go, wow, I just made it through that passage. We collectively are making it through the passage. And it’s a really difficult time. But there are extraordinary examples every single day of a human being, beyond human beings, who are doing wonderful stuff. I mean, people are being creative and compassionate and skillful and brave all the time. In these bleak times, two days from now, I’m going with my friend Patrick and we’re going to spend the morning with a group of ten girls, young women, two 15 year-olds, and eight 17 year-olds, young women and five are Jewish-Israeli, and five are Palestinian. They’ve come with this organization about friendships, for peace, and creating friendships, for peace. And so here are these young women who are coming literally from their homeland, flying to Logan Airport in Boston, today, and Friday, they’re gonna sit in a circle with us. And they’re committed to spending the next three or four weeks with each other, sharing a room with someone who is from the other side. An Israeli-Jewish girl is going to be rooming with a Palestinian young woman who’s probably Muslim or Christian. And they’re doing that for three or four weeks in a country probably none of them have traveled to, and I am humbled to get to sit with them for a few hours on Friday. I look at that kind of courage, the courage to come to another country in a bleak time, and for some, perhaps a country that is responsible for slaughtering your people that might be painful. Then for other people to come and say, Oh, I’m coming to a country where there’s been quite a lot of honorable protest about the military and the government of the nation. I look at that, and I go, wow, that’s a light in the darkness that these young people are coming and being willing to be with whoever defines the other person as other. I think that’s extraordinary.
Q: What instructions would you give to do our inner work?
A: All the simplest instructions I could give are notice, wonder, acknowledge, appreciate. That’s the quickest way I know to say, that’s a start on inner work if someone does nothing else. I’ve had the good fortune to sit in twelve-step meetings I sat in on for 30 years. I had done 20 years of individual psychotherapy, I’ve been in other groups, I’ve done all kinds of different stuff. And if someone said, well, that’s great for you little Miss Privilege Britches, I can’t do all that or that’s not right. I’d say okay can you notice? Can you just start by noticing what’s going on in your own body? Can you notice feelings? Can you identify your needs? Can you then notice what’s going on in the bodies around you? Can you wonder about yourself? Can you wonder about someone else? Can you be curious? Can you try to replace judgment with curiosity, starting with yourself? Can you acknowledge what’s true for you? Can you acknowledge that what’s true for me may not be true for you? Can I acknowledge the limits of what I know and understand? Can I acknowledge your pain, even if I don’t understand it, even if I’ve never experienced it? For me, all of that is inner work. Can I understand more deeply? For instance, when I’ve caused harm? If I’m able to understand more deeply, what are the patterns that I was replicating that resulted in harmful behavior? And then if I can be curious and go, what were the unmet needs I was trying to meet with that behavior, or with that choice with that relationship with that act with the words I said with the sermon I preached, whatever it was, can I identify? Can I be curious about that? And then acknowledge, oh, okay, here’s the need I was trying to meet. I can see now I can understand more clearly now that I, one, probably didn’t meet the need, and two, I might have caused harm to others in my attempt to meet it. So for me, that’s kind of the simplest scaffolding for inner work if I had no other tools, for me, those four verbs will get me somewhere.
Q: You have a chapter on ruminating on the restorative response to war. Is there a restorative response to war?
A: I’m still wrestling with that one, Beverly, because I’m always curious if there is and I think the closest I got to in that chapter is there has to be a part of any restorative response, there has to be some acknowledgment. There has to be accountability. If I go back to a simple, what does a restorative process look like between you and me, if harm is done in an interpersonal relationship, then as a restorative practitioner, the questions I’m going to ask are, in order for us to have a process if you come to me and say my neighbor, and I got into dispute could you have a restorative process to help us I don’t want to call the police or I don’t want to go to court but I want to resolve the conflict that my neighbor and I had.
I’ll give you an example. Someone might do something that if one party refuses to acknowledge their participation in something harmful, we got no process. I can work with someone who’s perpetrated harm. If the person who is harmed, says I want nothing to do with them. I’m out. I can still work with a person who’s caused harm on a process of accountability and that feels restorative because that might restore the person to right relationship with themselves. And if someone says I was harmed, and I want to process what’s going to help me to be empowered and figure out what I would want to say to that I can do all that. But if I sit with you and your neighbor, and you say, hey, my neighbor cut down my beautiful maple tree. He said one of the branches was in his yard and dropped leaves in his pool. And he came over when I was away, and he cut my tree down. And say you even have a wildlife camera or security camera, and we see that he came and cut it down. But if the guy goes I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t want to have a process. It doesn’t give us much to work with.
If I sort of zoom out to the world and war, I think it’s very hard if we have nation-states, which may be problematic in and of themselves, the whole concept of nation-states, but then we have these nations and the warring factors and one party or the other refuses to acknowledge impact. I don’t doubt that there are people like, for instance, Houthi rebels, in quotes, I don’t give them that term, but we sort of hear that. So who are people who are Houthi, who say, for the betterment of the world, I’m gonna bomb the ship in this shipping lane?
I remember Bashar al-Assad saying, I’m a surgeon, sometimes you have to amputate the leg to save the body, when people were saying, how can you use chemical weapons on your own citizens? I remember him saying that line because it’s stuck with me forever and I’m thinking, wow, if Bashar al-Assad genuinely believes we needed to get rid of these people for the betterment. I guess Adolf Hitler would say, look, I was just trying to improve the master race. I was just trying to purify it, which is the greater good. I had to get rid of all the parts that were impure. I think most of the world goes, yeah, that’s horrifying. And if we can’t get someone like Adolf Hitler to ever acknowledge the both/and, I will acknowledge that you thought you were building the master race, and you thought that was good. And here’s how it had an impact on me. If he’s unwilling to hear that, I think it’s hard. To me, a restorative response to war has to include what’s the effect of this on all beings. I want to talk all the time about the effect of war on non-human beings. It’s horrible what it does to the soil, what it does to waterways, what it does to birds, what it does to animals. Lots of other beings suffer from our human conflicts. So there’s a part of me that even wants to pull the lens back and say, if somebody says, well, this is in quotes a righteous war, the Russians invaded Ukraine, the Russian army is clearly the offending oppressive army, and Ukrainian people we must defend. I’m like, okay. But the whole world is more than just people, what is happening literally, to the ground. That’s why that essay begins with the literally the ground of our being. And, you know, this sort of Hebrew bible saying in Genesis the story of Cain and Abel, the ground cries out with the blood of it. For me, a restorative response to war would also include, what are the voices of the Earth what are the voices of the ancestors, what are the voices of the generations forward, what are the voices of the animals and the trees, and the birds, and what are the voices of the craftspeople whose artisans whose beautiful work is destroyed when bombs fall on museums, and destroy ancient artifacts, all of it. And if human beings aren’t willing to sit at the table with all of that, then I don’t know if there can be a restorative response. I mean, it’s hard because war for me, I’m kind of a pacifist. So, I don’t think I’m willing to accept the inevitability of war, and just say, well, that’s what human beings do and that we’re always gonna have war. I feel like that’s a failure of imagination.
Q: So we go from war to the last part of the book where joy gets the last word. The passage says, “Being restorative summons us to joy, however we experience it.” How is joy the last word?
A: Because joy is requisite for being restorative. If we want to be in right relationship, then we need to be in right relationship with joy. Which for me is, as much as anything would be, life’s longing for itself. Joy is that sort of biophilic life, inhalation, and exhalation of joy. I get that joy coexists with and springs from sorrow and grief and pain. For me, joy comes from that same wellspring of all the feelings. It feels a little bit different than just pleasure, happiness. It feels sort of deeper than that. It just feels like it has to have the last word because that’s how we as beings, say, yes to life. There’s that E.E. Cummings line, yes, there’s a world in which all other worlds skillfully curl, I feel like joy is us saying yes, yes to the world, or entering that world of yes, despite all the no’s, the reverberations of no’s and the echoes of no’s. To me, war is a no, war is just a defilement of life. My only frame for war is that it is a defilement of life. And joy for me feels like the ultimate, yes, whatever our word is Ashe, Amen, may it be so, joy feels like that. When you feel it, and, and it feels like that’s so important. For me, I guess the last thing I would say is that I’ve really cultivated what I call kind of a practice of joy.
Every day I make a collage, and I tear paper and paint paper. I try to do it in the morning because I try to begin my day in joy. And I’ll be honest, it gives me so much joy. Sometimes I just sit and open my little book and I just flip through the pages. I have several now because I’ve been doing it for quite a while. The idea is that every single day, I need to intentionally create space for and summon joy. There are many other ways I get joy, or I experienced joy, but this, I guarantee myself, no matter what’s happening, no matter if I wake up on November fifth and the election results are to my horror. I’m praying they won’t be. But stuff happens. And then I think, okay, I don’t want to surrender the possibility of joy. I mean, I can still have a great meal, I can break bread with people I love. But just that’s what I mean, having a practice, it could be anything, it could be knitting, it could be kayaking, it could be lovemaking, it could be singing, everybody finds their own joy, whatever it is, I just feel like that’s essential. Part of that has been so beautifully articulated by people in the Black community who’ve talked about Black joy. And, you know, you can have 400 years on this continent of oppression and brutality, and you will not take our joy from us. I’m like, preach it.
My Final Words:
This is my joy, speaking to authors, talking to people who bring knowledge, positions, and learning. I take what they give and absorb it and I go forward with the new knowledge, grateful for the time I was given.
Beverly Stoddart is an award-winning writer, author, and speaker. She is on the Board of Trustees of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. She is the author of Stories from the Rolodex, mini-memoirs of journalists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.