Taxes, muscles & getting out of your cave

Yesterday, tax day in the US. I don’t know why, but yesterday I just couldn’t share these pieces from my journal for our April Joy Experiment.

Maybe it felt too taxing? (Humor, yes, though I did feel autoimmune-y yesterday, a flare out of nowhere.)

That said, I will tell you there is joy even in taxes. Like other joys, often we don’t see the gifts and glimmers right in front of us.

The clear drinking water flowing from your faucet. The paved roads taking you smoothly from one little town to another. The medicines discovered, some that keep you alive, literally. The rebuilding after disasters, because well-being is hard when your world is torn up and it takes testing DNA to know to what happened to someone you love.

There are so many children who have so little. Taxes give them breakfast at school, let them go to school so they can each unlock the spark of their potential—who they are and what they bring to this world that only they can offer.

Having worked in the international development field for awhile, I met people, entire communities in financially impoverished regions of the world, who had none of these.

When your 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser tips sideways, getting stuck in glue-ish mud in the middle of a rainforest with no paved roads, and you see barefoot children with enormous jerry cans collecting water from a murky eddy, you miss what you thought was ordinary.

Water. Roads. Children reading and playing.

Some years ago in Sierra Leone, I met children who didn’t get to go to school because it meant paying a small fee that their parents still couldn’t afford. And the two-room school required shoes they didn’t have. And every day they needed to walk miles back and forth getting water for their family’s daily needs.

They had to stop often on the way back to their village because jerry cans full of brown water are heavy.

So, while taxation can be flawed and the resources sometimes used poorly, at the core is a tender pact: Let’s come together, give some of what we earn back, so that all of us can live a bit better.

No, I’m not making any political statement, just noticing joy in this pact. Caring feels good, yes?

Turning back to our experiment, for today I’m sharing briefer pieces, because my week didn’t allow time to explore my joy moments more deeply in the journal. That’s okay.

Remember, the point is to be open to those moments, to notice and lean into them, experiencing more of what’s there. The idea is to make it a daily practice, to be intentional in paying attention. Practice.

Saturday | April 12, 2025

What you don’t want, blooms anyway.

All along a path, the Himalayan blackberry vines reach toward me with their daggers and their fat buds. Pricks of blood at my ankle, a red zipper.

Invasive, I think, you don’t belong here. Also, Please bring me your black sweetness.

When they come, I will eat the berries that shouldn’t be here, licking the juice from my fingers, smiling at the purple stains I’ll carry with me wherever I go.

What if we’ve always wanted what we push away?

Sunday | April 13, 2025

Boot thrusting down on the shoulders of this shovel, I am the earth opener, the releaser of worm and rotting wood and ropy roots of the Nootka rose still under ground, and a scent, of what?

The red clay mud speaks in scent. What’s gone deep and what’s yet to rise, smell musty-sweet.

All morning I let the first spring calls of a California towhee, mixed with the regular psh, psh, psh, psh, psh of Chestnut-backed chickadees, and the warbling of one robin off in the distance enter through a window, through the bony labyrinths of my ears.

As I dig, the afternoon is quiet … and not. My head full of birdsong as I work.

Monday | April 14, 2025

Many clients tell me their ability to trust is gone or very weak. Grief and trauma do more than make you sad. Three times today, a phrase I’ve considered before enters my thoughts, Trust is a muscle.

“What would it mean,” I write to one client, “if trust were a muscle?”

The question is meant to open possibilities. The mind’s first leap is to add, Anything you stretch and exercise must get stronger, right?

Now, looking at my arm, flexing it, I’m pleased that all my wood splitting and hauling, yanking deep-clinging weeds from the pebbled path, carrying so much, so much, has left me with a bulge under skin the length of my humerus.

While gravity pulls at every edge of me, there’s the muscle tensed hard then relaxed, even as I move later into this life.

Now I think, Trust is not a muscle—it’s the practicing. Part intent, part consistent.

The act and the thing doing the act are not the same. The intentional flexing vs. what is flexed.

So what’s the muscle then?

It’s thousands of tiny, living fibers making the skeleton dance.

It’s the animal body knowing, This is what it means to be alive, trust that.

Tuesday | April 15, 2025

How easily you believe there is only your lonesome cave.

How easily you miss the shape of light everywhere. The handle of this cup, the button hanging from two threads, little lump of amethyst poking its purple into your attention.

The hand is a honeycomb of hollowness and pure energy, also called, light. You don’t have to hold on to it—it holds on to you.

More than once, in my neighbors’ yard, not far from the weathered wood bench where they sometimes sit looking into the forest, there’s been light in the shape of a deer, several turkeys, a scattering of Dark-eyed juncos, all eating seeds from the same patch of earth.

Wednesday | April 16, 2025

Each morning I try to discern pond water from night air.

Squatting in stones, I watch light lift up the day, in layers.

It’s the way you might wipe years of dust and smoke film from a window, the view emerging, the outline of a leaf, the furrowed bark of a tree, the day taking shape in detail. Then there, look, the shiny reflection that is you spread over all of it.

Just try to live in this world without being part of it. I dare you, I dare you.

Here’s a practice for you—then today's question

Focus on a muscle in your arm, leg, or abdomen, and tense it, feel its power, then release and relax it.

Try it a couple of times, noticing the sensation of flexing and easing that muscle, the changes in your animal body, your human mind.

Just doing this muscle practice is a way to lift yourself out of a dark mood or difficult moment. It draws your attention away from cycles of too much thinking that solve nothing and cuts through the veil of heavy emotions dragging you downward.

This tiny somatic practice brings you back into the personal physics of you.

It’s one version of a ‘state change,’ meaning it helps change, or shift, your state of mind and emotions toward greater well-being. It's often energizing.

I'm not saying avoid or deny challenging thoughts and emotions. In fact, they are there for a reason, so good to get curious about them and see what they are trying to tell you.

That said you also don't want to get stuck in them. Explore, then move forward.

Now close your eyes, if it feels safe, and remember what joy or lightheartedness or delight feels like when you’re in it.

Go back to the last time, or a special time, you experienced inner joy, or whatever nurturing feeling you want more of. Recall what was happening before that joy moment, then what it was like to be in it, and then when you knew it had passed.

Comments & Community

If you feel up to sharing how you're answering this question, comments are incredibly welcomed—and I will respond. Your shared experience may be just the support and inspiration someone else needs.