Flavors of joy and reverberations of appreciation
And all I want for Mother's Day is a society rooted in care and love
For me, there is no joy like bike riding joy.
This week, for the first time since I moved to Costa Rica, I went for a bike ride. The university is 7km from home, which is a lovely distance for a daily commute. As we’ve been getting life set up here, I hadn’t gotten as far as to thinking about acquiring a bike. I knew a student who had an e-bike, and asked him about purchasing it from him when he leaves Costa Rica. This week I borrowed it to try it out.
It was my first bike ride since leaving Colorado in September. And it. Was. Glorious.
There are many other things that bring me joy, but there is nothing quite like biking joy. The bike was sitting in my office, and I was intimidated. I had never ridden an e-bike before. How do I do it? I was teaching, it has been very hot in the afternoon…many conditions preventing me from getting the courage to take it out for a spin.
Finally, I did, and as soon as I hopped on, I felt immense joy. Freedom. Fun. Play.
And that’s when I realized: there is a particular flavor of joy that only bike riding gives me. It is vast and immense, and it tastes and feels different from other joys I experience. It is a mix of joy, freedom, and feeling like a kid again.
So many other things bring me joy. Daphne, her laughter, her creativity, her being. Singing. Teaching. Traveling. Friends. Family. Coffee. And on and on.
But the particular flavor of joy I experienced on the bike, I hadn’t experienced since the last time I got on a bike. And I do really experience it every time I ride a bike.
So I got curious about these flavors of joy, its palette, how different things that bring me joy bring slightly different flavors and tones of it. Singing, for me, definitely also has it’s own particular flavor, especially because singing is simultaneously a vehicle for any of the emotions that are present in the song itself. As a singer, you become a channel for those emotions. The singing palette of joy feels like joy mixed with the presence required to use my full bodied instrument, plus whatever emotions are present in the expression of the song.
What are your palettes of joy? What are the things that give you a particular flavor of joy like nothing else?
Reverberations of appreciation
This week I have also been thinking about reverberations of appreciation, how when you offer appreciation and gratitude to someone, it sometimes gets beamed back to you, reverberating back and forth in the space between you and beyond.
For the last class I taught, Education in Emergencies, we had a number of guest speakers who brought in their knowledge of working in different crisis situations. It was deeply enriching to hear from their personal experiences, and we were so appreciative of the time, energy, vulnerability, openness, stories, and experiences each of them shared with us.
On the last day of class we spent some time creating appreciation Jamboards for each one of them, which included notes of thanks and things we learned from them. This week I sent them out, and they were received with so much appreciation, bouncing back to us. Two of the guests, Edgar Buryahika and Johanna Wolf de Tafur - both of whose peace education work I recommend you checking out! - posted about their time with us and their Jamboards publicly on LinkedIn (follow the preceding links to see them), and all of our guests responded with notes to say how much it meant to them. In their words, they felt affirmed, motivated, inspired, humbled.
It was a small thing, to offer our collective thanks, and yet it felt energetically big, gratitude returned reciprocally back and forth in continuum, reverberating waves between us and beyond us, infinite and vast.
Where have you noticed reverberations of appreciation in your own life? How might you offer some appreciation today, even in a small way?
I seem to have a thing for rediscovering my joy of biking around Mother’s Day. It is Mother’s Day weekend in the US. In Costa Rica it is celebrated in August and I feel some relief not being in the midst of it. I have a fraught relationship with the holiday since becoming a mother, and since losing my mother. While it brings up some grief for me around my mom being gone, more than anything, it brings up feelings of anger and resentment around living in a patriarchal society that does not value mothers (or children), mothering, or acts of care in general. What do I want for Mother’s Day? A society that values care work. Period. A society rooted in love and care. Systems and institutions grounded in care and love. Values of care and love at the center of everything. That would be the best honoring we could do of mother energy. Smash the white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy and build a world that values mothers, children, mothering, Mother Earth. A society that values life. Today and every day.
I was on a call yesterday and as a check-in question, we were asked to share an appreciation for the mother energy in our lives - Mother Earth, our birth mothers, other mothers we know and love and who care for us - which I found to be a beautiful question (thanks, AD!).
Where do you feel appreciation for mother energy in your life?
I appreciate the transition to rainy season we are feeling here, as the afternoon rains and thunderstorms make their return, nourishing the dry land and cooling things down. I appreciate that my mom connected me to this wonderfully whacky, wild, weird, and caring world of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, and that I have gotten to become connected to an amazing group of people through the Peace Fellowship we established in her honor.
Happy Mother’s Day to those celebrating. Thank you to everyone who is caring for and tending life on this precious planet.
A Mother’s Day Wish and Blessing
May we honor the mother energy in our lives.
May mothers everywhere feel valued, loved, and supported.
May we value, respect, and appreciate the seeding, growing, tending, caring, gestating, creative life force energy in our lives.
May we honor and value mothering in the ways we organize ourselves - in our systems, structures, institutions, communities.
May we put care and love at the center of everything.
May we nurture our nurturers.
May we value acts of nurturing and care.
Thank you to our mothers, givers of life.
