The body of joy

A third of the way into The Joy Experiment, and I’ve been touched by the personal responses I’ve received via email and through the comments posted in the private community space for each post, which lives online at The Wild Now.

I’m grateful to hear how some are slowing down to explore ordinary moments in their day and find shiny bits of solace, ease, delight, calm, resilience, and yes, joy, or experiences that come close to joy, even if not quite joy (yet). Wonderful!

One comment that comes up frequently is reflected in this emailed compliment (thank you :-): “Kimberley, I love how your writing brings your moments to life for me, but I don’t write or see the details like you.”

This ‘experiment’ isn’t about becoming more like me, it’s about becoming more of you.

I didn’t always write or see the way I do now. Decades of practice brought me here. True that some of us have more native ‘poet eyes,’ as one of my clients describes it, than others. But ‘poet eyes’ aren’t so much an inborn talent as a skill to be cultivated.

Anyone can develop their ‘poet eyes’ to see—or hear or touch or taste or smell—more of any moment. Tapping into all of your senses and focusing on what they can bring you is like opening a secret door and discovering there’s more to the room you’re already in.

When you think you’ve experienced all that a place or space of time offers, as suggested in the last issue (linked below), ask yourself, “What else is here?”

Then, slow down, linger, try to open wider your mind, body, emotions, and spirit (whatever that means for you). I think you’ll be surprised by the richness already there waiting for you to discover it. And in the doing, joy and well-being often emerge.

Today, I have two journal shares for you and a question to help you celebrate the body of you as a source for meaning, connection, and inner peace.

Monday, April 7, 2025

Waiting for water to boil for tea, it’s true—better to watch something other than the kettle. So, I stand in my garden room, technically a greenhouse, a glass box with plants and places for cats to nap.

Looking out, there they are. The three amigos and their menagerie of merry maidens. Fourteen turkeys in all, regulars here.

They’ve found the grain tossed out for them, other birds, chickarees (our local squirrels), and a range of mammals who come at night to scavenge whatever the daytimers haven’t eaten.

I know, not good to feed wildlife, so disclaimer: Don’t try this at home. My wildlife-biologist spouse began the ritual when he was well, which feels like a badge of expert approval. It makes us happy, grounded, connected to a place full of lives more mysterious than our own.

In a time where species are lost daily, planet and people all suffering some stress, shared as well as private, why not be a refuge?

The three amigos, amorous males, are displaying. Plush chests puffed up hugely, tails fanned out, bronzy feathers so iridescent in the sunlight they look metallic, their wattles flaming red—these are three dazzlers.

The amigos keep ample space between them, each slowly circling, strutting, their steps slow, intentional. “Pay attention to me. I’m magnificent,” their big, birdy bodies say. If they were humans, they’d surely have Tik Tok accounts.

The hens are nonchalant, apparently more interested in snacks than romance. There are few vocalizations. One amigo or another will randomly break into an iconic gobbling. Sometimes maidens will make a lovely cooing or purring.

Mostly though, they speak through their bodies.

Watching, I try to understand their lingo. Then, out of the blue, literally, dropping down from the sky, Mourning doves arrive, whistling—not vocally, rather it’s one way their wings talk.

Pure body language.

Before words, and now in a world bursting with human words, all language begins with, “I am here.” Then comes, “Let’s be here, together.”

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

My hands, my mother’s hands. My hands in hers, hers in mine.

Sitting in the sun, the glorious warmth holding me, I take a break from feeling untethered, caught in a temporary wave of lost-ness that strikes some days.

Adrift. That’s the word that floats in my sea of thoughts. Adrift. Why doesn’t it feel like free? No answer.

So, for a little while, I let the sun find my face, my bare feet and ankles, arms explosed from biceps to fingertips, hands hanging down over the curved sides of the porch chair.

Yellow flowers rock slightly on the surface of my little pond. Lemony faces. Their green, viney arms stretch out over the water. Their big, roundish leaves stick up, as if hands raised to ask a question.

What do you want, friends? Their roots clutch stones and detritis below. Anchored, you’re anchored with me. No place to go, but here.

Peaceful, though I can’t say we’re sitting in silence together, as if part of some meditative pond retreat. A buzzy carpenter bee cycles my head, and through the windows, the sound of some sport on the telly, muffled cheers and talking.

Still, it feels so damn good to sit, sunlit, toasty, with all this bobbing yellow and sprawling green. We’re just being. Be-ing.

It’s a tiny spider strutting over my wrist that draws my eyes to my right hand. An unusual amber color, the spider is on a mission, the swift threads of her eight legs propelling her over my knuckles.

Aiming a puff of breath her way, I admire how she spins out a bit of shimmery spider rope, so she always lands sprinting, safe and graceful.

Light, its angle on my hand shows a million micro-creases and veins rising up, prominent. Then I look at my other hand, the same.

That’s when the words come: My hands, my mother’s hands. My hands in hers, hers in mine.

My mother’s hands were so different from mine—slender, almost delicate, with long fingers, and darker, what we called, olive-toned. My hands are wide and pinkish-white, fingers fleshier, knuckles and metacarpal bones thicker, more masculine, more my father’s.

As a child, I was fascinated by the tops of my mother’s hands.

After her elegant fingers would crush out a cigarette in an ashtray, she’d stand up, her hands dropping down, dangling at her sides. Within seconds, hills rose up, bluish-purple, just beneath her smooth skin. A trick? A bit of mother-magic?

More than once, I ran my fingers over the peaks, into the furrows. Sometimes I’d sense a pulsing, her pulsing.

“Your hands are pretty,” I’d say, just before she took my hand in hers to cross a street or enter a store. “No,” she’d answer, “My hands look old and ugly. Nevermind them.”

She hated that her hands rippled that way. Struggling with vericose veins and bouts of plebitis in her legs, it was as if her vessels were against her. She felt flawed.

Now I sit with my own hands, studying each one closely, as if rare earth artifacts.

Left touches right. Right touches left. Rubbing rough skin. Following the skeletal structure. Noticing how the veins bow, bend, and branch out. This scar has a story. All the fine lines are a map of travels.

I press left thumb into the blue ridge above what I call my mutant joint, the slightly deformed and tender basal joint where right thumb and wrist connect. Pressing, there’s the beat, my beat.

Funny, a flash of memory. I hear my mother, “You just march to the beat of a different drum.”

She worried that I spent too much time alone in my room and in my head, solving self-made math puzzles, agonizing over the right word to put in a poem, composing a symphony, hearing within how a french horn blends with clarinets, oboe, and timpani. “You just march to the beat of a different drum,” she’d tell me, though now I belive those words, consoling, were for her.

All creative, youthful musings required my hands. So many pencils gripped, paper caressed, the flute and piccolo held, silvery cool, and lifted to my lips.

My hands have minds of their own, curious and wise.

I turn my hands over, exploring palms, mystified by the always-pruny pads of my fingers. I turn them back over, massage the writer’s bump on a middle finger. They’ve been obedient, too.

My mother’s hands are now in mine as mine once were in hers.

Certainly not pretty, I could call these hands old and ugly, except they’re not.

Beyond them, the buttery blossoms bright atop the pond remind me: My hands are my roots. Little anchors against the drifting.

So much of what fixes me to this world is through these hands.

They carry so much, even when they carry nothing.

See the subterranean streams—their blue water flows back to my heart, flows all the way back to my mother.

The body as a temple to be honored and well cared-for is an old idea, turning up in so many spiritual traditions.

Biblical as well as yogic traditions view the body as a sacred vessel for the soul or spirit. The ancient Egyptians took the idea one step farther, mummifying the deceased in case they needed their bodies in the afterlife.

Today many of us take our bodies for granted, often focusing on the parts we don’t like. Yet all we know of ourselves in this world is through our animal bodies, fleshy and bone-built, physical yet temporary.

While we may have ideas about 'the before' and 'the after' of our too-swift human lives, we don’t truly know who we are without a body.

As long as we’re here, we can’t really connect with those we love and experience this time and place we’re in without our beautiful, flawed, animal bodies.

“Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
…
Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it ….”
— Joyce Sutphen, from her poem, Living in the Body

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.