One Worth Repeating from Mary Oliver

a writing prompt about joy....yes, joy! + a Writing Hour update

Oct 23, 2024

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

Grief, gratitude, sorrow, joy. It’s cycling through me and others in the western part of our state. I live in the foothills of North Carolina, just east of some of the worst of Hurricane Helene’s brutality. In my town, we dealt with our own share of flooding, and power and water loss. But the water went down, and the lights came on, and clean water came back. We can shop for groceries (but not in our flooded store), and go out to eat (but not in the flooded restaurants), and get gas (but not at the flooded stations). If I close one eye and squint, it seems like things are getting back to normal at my house. I’m not mucking out a basement, or feeding a crowd downtown. I spend part of Sunday under the covers reading, trying to rest my body and lungs so my hacking post-Covid cough doesn’t turn into pneumonia. I cook a winner of a dinner, and start the Great British Baking Show’s newest season. I’m removed just enough from the ongoing trauma if I want to be, and that feels wrong and random and lucky, all at the same time.

Then the cycle swings around and the weight hits again. I watch the 60 Minutes episode about NC and realize I spoke to one of the women in it last week about her flooded church I can see on my screen. I lose it when they show pictures of the town I used to live in. I hear the exhaustion in a colleague’s voice, trying to lead a church and care for her own family and home, when none of us were taught how to do what she’s doing now. I drive my daughter an hour in to Asheville to retrieve items from her apartment. We talk to a neighbor who lost everything but her dog, tote water to flush toilets, deal with a gnat infestation, turn off breakers because the power is on (!), and incongruously pack up a fancy dress because she got invited to a gala in Charlotte. A gala! Weird, wonderful, awful—yes if you want you should go and enjoy—and—I know it seems wrong right now—all of it.

And yet…

In the middle of the cycling around between the ordinary and the awful, moments of joy bubble up. My husband turns a corner and finds my daughter and me trying to move a heavy chair while each holding an ice cream cone in one hand, and suddenly none of us can stop laughing. The dog eats two boxes of tissue, then lays her head in my lap and looks up at me like I'm her favorite. (Which I am.) A colleague at a church moving mountains to help their community describes how exactly what is needed arrives exactly when it’s needed. I witness another colleague’s joy when the UPS truck delivers the guitar that was stranded for a month in an Asheville warehouse; and he is a tiny step closer to playing music on a camping trip, when he’s done delivering camping gear up the mountain for displaced families. The leaves are changing here, on the trees that were halfway underwater, and they are beautiful. The mountains are visible in places they weren’t before the storm. Joy is underneath the mud, and finds a way to the surface. Don’t walk past it.

I’ve shared this Mary Oliver poem before, but I read a couple lines differently today.

Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
—Mary Oliver1

a writing prompt

Use Mary’s words to start your writing, even if you’ve written about this one before. Choose a line from the piece to begin, then keep your pen moving. If you suddenly or finally find a word or two of joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it and keep writing.

Writing Hour Update - Two Sessions in November!

Hurricane Helene has scrambled everything. We lost a September date to write altogether, and now October has run out on me. So I’m scheduling two Writing Hours for paid subscribers in November. These will be Saturday November 2nd and Saturday November 23rd, both from 4-5 pm Eastern. Mark your calendar now! If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

helping Western North Carolina

There are so many people helping in so many ways. I’ve shared several organizations I’ve seen in action. Here’s another I visited this week. Centro Unido is a LatinX non-profit housed at a Presbyterian church in Marion, NC. They already had a broad reach with a food pantry, translation services, tutoring and classes, healthcare, advocacy and more. Since the storm, they have filled a space with clothing, camping gear, diapers and more to give away, worked with World Central Kitchen to give out free food daily, and are working on home repairs and free mental health and wellness opportunities for their community. They are leveraging their deep partnerships in the county and state, in an impressive model of empowerment. If you are looking for a place to donate, they are helping folks who don’t qualify for FEMA aid (which, by the way, is also on the ground and helping…..)

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Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.

Writing in Company