with Ross Gay

Krista Tippett: I have heard, in the last few years, a question rolling around the world. It goes something like this: “How could you be joyful in a moment like this, in a world like this?” The question troubles me because it suggests that joy is a privilege. But joy, in human life, is a resilience-making, life-giving birthright of being human, and to suggest that you can’t be joyful in a time like this is akin to the idea that you can’t be hopeful unless everything has gone right for you. Joy is a companion to hope as a wellspring of resilience.

My wonderful teacher on this is Ross Gay, a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings his own way in to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us, and we have to tend to that as seriously and as fiercely as how we tend to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel, even — and especially — in experiences of great challenge. And Ross Gay is infectious. His presence is infectious. I’m not sure that we used the word “hope” in the conversation we had, but hope emanated from it.

As I said, he’s a poet and he’s also a very intense lover and interrogator of words. His work actually reminds me of that Emily Dickinson quote that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” He told me that the etymology of the word “delight” is both “of light” and “without light” — which, again, drives at the deeper meaning of this; that, as he says, "adult joy knows that suffering and loss always live close by life and love. And that knowledge brings what is good and joyful all the more into relief."

He works really interestingly with his community garden and the complex interplay that is in a garden, between death and life and beauty and loss and pleasure, season after season after season. So the part of the interview that I want you to hear a little bit of here is about the practice he undertook to write his book of poetic essays called The Book of Delights.

Tippett: So what surprised you in the process of moving through that year, and moving through that year looking for delight and writing about delight every day?

Ross Gay: Many things surprised me, I suppose. But one of the things that surprised me was how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident. That was really quick. [laughs] And I wasn’t sure. I was a little bit like, “This is gonna be hard, to just have something delightful happen every day.”

[laughter]

Tippett: You said somewhere it’s like you developed a delight radar or a delight muscle. Well, it seems to me it’s a little bit — it’s kind of the inverse or the opposite experience from going to the therapist every week, where you’re kind of saving up things [laughs] that illustrate your neurosis. And you were doing the opposite. [laughter]

Gay: Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s fun. It was fun.

Tippett: But what are some of the things that you noticed that you found delightful and called “delight” that you wouldn’t have imagined before you started?

Gay: You know, it just occurred to me. It made me realize, too, how often I am delighted, how often things happen that — like you were doing this hand gesture, and you were doing these hand gestures. I was like, “I love hand gestures” when you were doing that. I do them too, with abundance. [laughter]

I realized, over the course of writing the book, how much I love — I have a title of one of the pieces in there, but it’s like — how do I say it? “Physical contact that is pleasant — unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions,” I think is what I call it. I love how frequently I’m in the presence of sweet little interactions that don’t have to happen, but do have to happen.

Tippett: I guess some that I noticed — just these ordinary things like seeing two people sharing the burden of carrying a shopping bag or a sack of laundry, how they are helping each other, and how their bodies are adjusting to each other.

Gay: [laughs] It’s pretty amazing. It’s an amazing thing. But it’s not, until you say it’s amazing. [laughter] It’s like, “Whoa, that’s amazing. We do that all the time.”

Tippett: I think sometimes about this phrase, “made my day” — that we have the power with our words and with all kinds of small gestures like that — even like somebody being really nice in a checkout line, or you being nice to somebody in a checkout line after the last two people were really rude to them. And you watch a transformation take place that you made — that their day was getting broken, and you made — what an incredible power we have to walk through the world making somebody’s day.

Gay: Yeah. Just in a soft way. It’s kind of amazing.

Tippett: There’s also a lot of café runs. [laughs]

Gay: [laughs] That’s something too. I was like, man, I drink a lot of coffee.

Tippett: There’s a lot of the vegan donut that you haven’t even eaten yet but it’s already delighting you, just the thought of getting to it.

Gay: Totally. Yeah, that’s right. [laughs]

Tippett: And also, arugula and greens and garlic from your garden.

Gay: Yeah, my garden, and it’s funny because people, when they talk about the book, they notice the garden as a primary feature of the book.

Tippett: The garden is actually a character in the book.

Gay: Yeah, and it didn’t occur to me, probably because the garden is so much in my life.

Tippett: It’s precisely the closeness and ordinariness of what Ross attended to that I think makes him a teacher to me and to all of us. The invitation here is to play around with developing your own “delight radar.” There’s nothing stopping any of us from making this daily exercise that he took on an exercise that we take on for some period of time.

I want to share something else Ross wrote that I love and drew him out on. It is a lovely deepening and a turn on a lot of the themes that have come through in this course: about the importance of what we get proximate to, and orient towards, and devote our words to, and put ourselves in service of.

He said this: “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting. But imagining and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted — that’s harder for us, it seems.”

This is the final session of this Hope course for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed and been edified, and sometimes delighted. Take some time to let it all settle inside you, inside your life. Maybe that is what the journaling will be about this week, as well.

And, if you decide to pursue nothing else as follow-up, keep your delight radar on. This is, of course, a pleasant practice, but it holds such a profound, emotionally intelligent, resilience-making insight: That even as we know what frightens us, and what we must fight and resist, what we must compost and hospice in this world that it not serving our highest humanity, even and especially amidst this hardness of being alive now — the muscle of hope calls us to orient around what we love and hold dear: the world we want to be part of making, and nourishing.

Thank you for being here, for being, in the first place, on the generative landscape of our time; for investing your life force already in the superpower of hope and its life-giving, reality-shifting force in our world that carries so much pain and so much promise.

Blessings to you, from me, until we meet again!