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?

And 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. And my wonderful teacher on this is Ross Gay, a poet and 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 actually 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

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