Dancing with Joy

I will begin what I know will feel like a "short" three-day retreat tomorrow morning after driving the kids to school and dragging the garbage and recycling out the curb. If you know me at all, you probably can understand how it is often a temptation for me to take along more than I could ever read, to take along a dozen books when it would be more profitable to focus on one. Or to focus just on a page or two. So this time I've been striving to be minimalistic in my planning. And I'm taking along just one book, a compilation of 99 poems edited by Roger Housden, Dancing with Joy. Just one, thin book. Quite something for me.

Along with the book, just these supplies: a journal with plenty of blank pages, two fountain pens, a one-page printout of John 3:14-21 in two versions, and a photocopy of one of my favorite, joyful poems (which isn't in the book)--Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "So Much Happiness."

So Much Happiness
for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Naomi Shihab Nye. Far Corner Books, 1995.

Maybe I'll just leave the book at home and take the poem and the scripture and the blank notebook, and see what might flow out of my pen. Or maybe I'll just spend three days thinking about the night sky and the moon, and about being truly known... and loved.

Peace Love & Coffee,
Randy