The morning sun flecks on my face through the maple leaves. I’m sitting on our front steps with my mug of coffee, and the sweet smell of spring grass overwhelms me. If you’ve ever gotten out of bed before the rest of your house, brewed a strong cup of French press dark roast, and relished a moment or two at the dawning of a day, you know how delicious this feels. I greet neighbors as they leave for work, I watch sparrows and robins flit about looking for worms, and I wait for the running steps of my daughters down the stairs behind me, their eagerness to join me outside propelling them forward and nearly through the screen door.
But they aren’t awake yet. So I sit.
Delight does not always come naturally to me. I truly believe we are born with certain dispositions (and these can be nurtured and shaped), and I think mine leans heavily towards mourning. I like to think this preemptive mourning comes from the deepest delighting, but I’m not sure that’s the truth. I think its origin, most honestly, is fear.
The milkweed is growing tall next to me, its fuzzy leaves belying its milky bitterness inside. We had a monarch hatch last summer, so I am hopeful for another successful chrysalis. I’ve watched so many monarch caterpillars die over the years, and yet, I hope.
The honeybees aren’t even awake, that’s how early it is. The sun hasn’t yet hit the front of their hive, so they wait, patiently or not, for a day’s work. Every time I walk past them, I feel a deep sense of joy. Look at this life. Look at this community of life. I delight in their togetherness, their deeply important work, and my garden (fingers crossed) will provide for them and be pollinated by them and we will all rejoice. Time will tell.
I am slowly reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights; slowly because the mini essays are like snapshots I savor. I love when poets write essays. Only poets really have a handle on the right word, the flow of sound, the power of connection. Gay makes me ponder what I’m delighting in — gives me permission to take delight in the absurd, the funny, the sad.
Of course, as other parents of young children will tell you, it is my children that are reteaching me delight. It abounds in their enthusiasm over the smallest insect sighting, the sprouting radishes, the ripening strawberry. I wish I could say I had taught them this, but it is more honest to say they were born with it. It seems more my job not to squash it in them than to teach it to them.
So what do I delight in? What is pointing me to God?
The list looks a bit like that which I am tending, but it isn’t identical, and neither are the items on both lists for the same reasons.
My children consistently delight me. (Notice I did not say constantly, a distinction pointed out to me by a youth group leader in high school, for which I am forever grateful).
Gabe, without whom so much of my life would never have come to pass. Although this is true, delight doesn’t seem quite the right word for how I feel about him, but it will have to do.
Reading a book I can’t put down. The magic of story, of truth well-told. Of connection, if you will.
Learning new skills in the kitchen: fermenting, bread-baking, broth-making. I’ve begun to dabble with grinding my own grain, for kicks more than anything. Or is it the delight of feeling the wheat berries slip through my fingers before becoming flour?
The seeds sprouting in my unkempt garden beds. The hope of a new season.
The joy a new baby brings. Waiting for friends and family to add to our little flock of young ones.
As I sit feeling the cold stone against my bare toes and hearing the opening of the girls’ bedroom door above me, I desperately try to hold on to this feeling of delight as the day unfolds. There is much to mourn in this world. Let us not begrudge someone a bit of joy, a bit of delight where they can snatch it.