Scatter Words of Joy

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As a child, my favorite Christmas song was “Joy to the World.”  My mother once told me she used to marvel at how I would belt out the words to that song like I was a Broadway star as I sat on the seventh row of the Southport Methodist Church. I loved the song, but more than that I liked the word “joy.” I figured you had to work to be happy, but it seemed you could choose joy.

By now this word has woven itself into the tapestry of me. When I was ten or eleven, I didn’t like my name. Instead of Sandi, or Sandra when mom was mad, I wanted a name like Annette of Disney fame, but then I learned the name of the girl with braces in my Scout troop. Leading up to Christmas that year, this girl who was new to our troop had been my secret Santa. On our “reveal day,” I met her, and she gave me a journal and signed the card “Joy.” At that moment it dawned on me that the word joy could be a name. I wanted it.

A week later I asked my mom to file a petition to change my name. “It would be a great Christmas present,” I suggested, doodling the word in my new journal like each letter was a jewel. My mom, sporting her hip corduroy pedal pushers and sneakers, was whipping up one of seventeen coffee cakes she baked and topped with walnuts for neighbors and church friends each holiday. “I like the name, Joy,” I added trying to catch her eye before she continued mixing the cake flour into the mixer bowl.

“Joy is a nice name, but you cannot change your name,” my mother said after pausing her Sunbeam mixer. “Your dad and I gave you the name Sandra because it is a special word. It means special things. Strength. Courage. Goodness. Kindness. Helper of others.” She wiped her bangs from her sweaty brow. “We wanted that for you,” she added definitively. In a peace offering she clicked the beaters out of the mixer and handed me one to lick, ending the conversation.

After that I started singing “Joy to the World” with complete abandon and probably off-key at church. Perhaps this was a child’s protest over the name debacle. Perhaps I genuinely felt the spirit of Christmas and this lovely word. But by now I understand that my mother knew best. While Joy did not become my name, Mom championed my connection to the word by buying me a Christmas ornament etched with the word “joy” that year. By now I have a nice collection of “joy” ornaments from her and friends. I also have a nice collection of words that I have learned to champion. In college I liked the word “peace,” when I bore my first child I could not stop celebrating with the word “miracle,” and during the pandemic I have become a fan of “hope.”

By now I have learned there are good reasons to hold on to words that lift us up. Words like love and peace, and of course, joy. According to Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman, words can actually have a profound impact on our brain.

In their book, Words Can Change Your Brain,” the authors write, “Certain positive words – like “peace” or “love” –may actually have the power to alter the expression of genes throughout the brain and body, turning them on and off in ways that lower the amount of physical and emotional stress we normailly experience throughout the day.”

How does this work? If you repeatedly think about the word “peace,” you will begin to experience a sense of peacefulness. As your thalamus receives this message of peace, it accepts it and passes it on to the rest of the brain. Then pleasure chemicals such as dopamine are released, and the brain is able to help your body relax and feel peaceful. At the same time anxiety and stress dissipate. Newberg and Waldmans’ brain scan research shows us that focusing on positive words can be stronger medicine than most drugs.

The music box from my mom.

Today as I finished decorating my Christmas tree, I rummaged through my storage closet until my eyes landed on the Christmas stash. There was the velvet red tree skirt I needed. As I tugged it from the shelf, I knocked down a small box with it. It was a gift box that looked like it had been opened and lost in the fray with this pile of decorations. When I reopened it, it took me by surprise. My mother gave me this music box when I visited with her on Christmas day, two months before she died. Finding it felt magical to me. I was being called to remember. Now I wound it up and listened as the tiny white angel danced to the twinkling sounds of “Joy to the World.” I was filled with the wonder of the season. I send wishes that you discover many of these moments, too.

Unexpected Gratitude

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Living in the desert it is my morning ritual to begin each day with a large, bubble glass full of black iced tea. The bubble glasses were a long-ago wedding present, and since they are party glasses, it makes me joyful to drink my tea from them.

Five years ago, Steve had business in Japan. Usually, I don’t’ sign on to his trips, but this was pre-COVID, and he promised we would attend a tea ceremony. That snagged my interest.

After hours on a plane and a short train ride, we arrived in the futuristic glass train station of Kyoto. The train station proved to be a stark contrast to the tiny historic streets of Kyoto lined with old Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as well as restaurants that make an art of ancient Japanese cuisine.

On our third day we visited the tea house on one of these cobblestoned streets. We waited outside in alternating drizzle and rain until the appointed time.  Then the door to the tea house slid open and a charming young woman in a pale green kimono dotted with red and white cherry blossoms peeked out at us. She pointed to a faucet near the door. “Please wash hands,” she said in a childlike singsong. Following her direction, we left our shoes outside the house, and ducked to enter a new world of tea.

Wordlessly, the girl ushered us into the tearoom with a huge cast iron pot in the center. Steve sat at the head of the mat with me by his side across from our host. We were taught to kneel, sitting on our legs, and to bow toward each other in a gesture of greeting.  An older woman dressed in a dark formal kimono appeared from behind a silk-sheeted door and bustled into the room, placing candies wrapped in white papers in front of us.

We shared our names. Stephen. Sandra. Then the girl pointed to the older woman, “Mother,” she explained. We nodded in deference. Then the girl placed her palm on her own chest and said, “Hana.” She spoke it like a song.

“Hana,” we repeated.

I tried to nibble at the candy which tasted like iced sugar cubes. “Do we have to eat it?” Steve whispered. I nodded at him. Then I tried to smile as the sugar cube caught in my throat and made me choke. I had swallowed it almost whole. The older woman’s face froze as if I had violated the official tea protocol.

Steve tried to cover for me declaring, “Good. Very good.” And the poor man who hates sweets was rewarded with a second candy that he munched with inauthentic joy. Peace was restored in the tearoom.

The mother had slipped behind the silk-sheeted door and returned with a tray containing small cups, tea bowls, and a whisk. She placed them in front of Hana who ceremoniously wiped them and began to mix and mash the tea.  “Matcha.  Green tea.  It is like gold. Expensive.” The words lit up her face.

Then she passed the tea to her mother for approval. Carefully the mother examined the tea, sniffed it, and then formally nodded.

“Now you must approve the tea,” Hana explained to us. Then the mother lifted the teacup and while I could not detect exactly what happened, it appeared in passing the teacup to Steve it got caught in the sleeve of her kimono and flipped over. The precious matcha powder lay scattered across the mat. The women’s faces took on the haze of the dark clouds outside, and I thought the mother might cry.

“It’s okay,” I said catching the mother’s eye. But her humiliation was painted across her face as she lowered her head and swept up the tea.

“It’s okay,” Steve repeated. But their silence clouded the room.

I wanted to tell them stories of my many goof-ups. How I fell off a pommel horse in fourth grade PE and landed on my head with my neon red dress tossed over my head and my cotton underwear on full display for my classmates. Or about last year when I turned around during the celebration of my son and ran directly into a huge and ornate birthday cake. Not only did I disfigure the cake, but my white blouse also looked like a Pollack painting smeared with buttercream icing and chocolate.

While I wanted to break the tension with my stories, I sensed this was not the place. A deep-seated awkwardness hung in the air as Hana mixed the new tea. Then her mother passed the cup to Steve. He sipped it and nodded with genuine pleasure. Then the women turned their gaze to me as I was handed my cup. I drank it slowly. Carefully. The tea smelled like the fresh grass in May, but it tasted like bitter greens followed with a kick of licorice. I willed myself to like it.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed as I lowered my cup. “Good! Very good!”  The mother sighed with relief and Hana’s smile returned. It was a dark, rain spattered day but suddenly it felt like a ray of sun had cut a path into the room.

The Story You Need to Tell Japanese Green Tea Ceremony

 

A thousand years ago Zen Buddhists sipped tea as way of staying awake during meditation. As we sipped our tea together this day, Hana explained how the ceremony had evolved as a way of bringing people together to honor the Japanese traditions of seeking calm, tranquility, and of sharing harmony and respect.  At the end of our time together, Hana turned unexpectedly to us. “You have honored us,” she said. She added a heartfelt, “Thank you.”

Looking back, I am grateful for the opportunity to travel, for being able to experience a world so different from mine, to see the perspective of Hana, her mother, and so many others.  But I came home with a greater appreciation, a most unexpected appreciation, of my own world:  the hummingbird who visits me daily, the black tea I sip from bubble glasses, the quiet writing time, and the stories I share with you and with friends.  It may not be an exotic world, but it is one that fills me with gratitude.

Large or small, what are you thankful for?

The Guest House

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Nine years ago, after my first writing class for cancer patients at Piper Cancer Center, Chloe inched shyly forward. She wanted to give me a gift. A poem. Rumi wrote,

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

I was moved by the idea of the gift, and before COVID, I hugged students, and I am certain I hugged sweet Chloe. But when I read the poem later, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket. Something about the words irritated me. Then I forgot about it.

Ten years ago in the same building, I had waited for an unwanted guest. I shivered as the door of the box-like office swung open. A chalk-white radiologist strode in and motioned me to sit back. It seemed as if we were trapped in a black-and-white 16mm film of my life, a scary, surreal film — the kind of strange avant–garde ones Andy Warhol used to make in the ‘60s. There was no sound but the ghostly doctor distinctly mouthed the words, You have cancer.   

An hour later I was curled up in the fetal position on the cold tile of my kitchen floor, rocking back and forth and feeling caught in the undertow of my mind. Unprepared. Thoughts swirling out of control. Jolted by surprise, I had joined the 250,000 women in the United States who each year learn they have breast cancer. I did not want this visitor.

The next morning, I drove to Changing Hands Bookstore where I often find solace not only in the space but in the pages of books. On this day I found a bright red journal and even before I went through the line to pay for it, I had scribbled my name in it and dubbed it, My Cancer Journal. These pages would hold my questions, my fears, and my heartfelt memories of test after test, physician after physician, and surgery after surgery in the coming year. In that time, I would see my mother’s scars from losing her breasts. In that time, I would lose both my breasts. In that time, I would cry and struggle to find my way forward. But I did. Cancer changed me, and my writing in the bright red journal was a huge part of this.

Today, as I finished teaching book club to a group of twelve sage women, many of them cancer patients or survivors, I realized it has been almost ten years since my diagnosis. At the end of class, one participant asked to read a poem that had helped her traverse her husband’s death to colon cancer and her own struggle with breast cancer. Vicki closed our class by reading these words,

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

This poem cut deep into my being as it had nine years ago.  Oh, yes, I remembered the pain of these words as I first read them and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I was struggling to open the door to my own cancer. Struggling with an unwanted guest.  I could not welcome and certainly not honor cancer. But now, all these years later, these words were lyrical and beautiful to me. As Vicki read them, I embraced them. For now, I could finally be grateful for my cancer. I could finally understand how it helped me become more of the person I needed to be.

As we all face this pandemic, another unwanted guest, I am trying to relearn the lesson Rumi’s poem held for me. I hope you will join me in allowing ourselves to sit with this difficult experience. Learn to accept it. Most of all, let us find a way to learn and grow from these unexpected challenges.