Are you a hunter, a gardener, or lantern-bearer?

For those new to The Wild Now, welcome to a tiny, month-long experiment I’m calling, The Joy Experiment. It began April 1st and concludes today. You can learn more about it by checking out previous issues below.

In the last issue (Are you tending your seeds?), we explored a practice I described as ‘noticing your little pulse of aliveness,’ by picking a random time each day to simply notice a moment deeply.

Did you try it?

I picked 7:11 as ‘my time,’ some days savoring the pause, twice!, and other days, so caught up in chores or, as it happens, some technical snafus, that I missed the moment entirely.

I didn’t say practice will be perfect. That’s why it’s best to keep practicing.

Today I’m hitting send on this issue of The Wild Now at 7:11, imagining the story-like epiphanies below finding their way to you. Writing and sharing with the intent to be helpful is how I try to be joy.

My goal for this April experiment in cultivating joy has been to share ‘joy moments’ from my journal with you twice per week as a way of supporting and inspiring your ability to tap into your own reserves of inner joy.

If you’ve missed me in your inbox, alas, early last week my online and web-based systems went down. All of them. Multiple times.

Ever try finding joy in tech problems?

Fortunately, I got it all untangled for this last installment of The Joy Experiment. This issue is a bit longer, trying to incorporate some elements of the issues I couldn’t share in real time last week.

So, grab some tea, coffee, or whatever you want to sip, settle in, and see what comes up for you.

What might you borrow or take away to support you—the way a chipmunk stuffs a nut in each cheek, taking it back to her nest?

Tuesday | April 22, 2025 (Earth Day) from my journal, in three parts

A joy: a bleeding heart, and a violet leaning in perhaps to introduce itself, both blooming at frog’s-eye level. No frog nearby, at least as far I can tell, so I let my human eyes soak in the color.

Sometimes light falls down through the clouds, through the trees with their dense filigree of needles, through bird feathers and bug wings, just one slender portal of light.

For a moment, a maple leaf, a mossy pebble, a mound of mole dirt are illuminated—brighter, more vivid, than everything around them.

For a moment, you see the shaft. It feels as if something big, sacred, mysterious, and far away is reaching down, wanting to touch what is small and seemingly inconsequential.

Also wanting to convey, Nothing is small and inconsequential.

When you saw this as a child, you called it, A God ray.

You are there seeing it all. You’re not in the bright shaft, at least not this one, though still part of the story, one of the inconsequential who nevertheless matters.

The portal is only there briefly. Soon leaf, pebble, mound will turn ordinary again.

Yet, you remain changed.

You carry that portal of light as you move on through your day.

Your eyes have their own portals of light that they cast here and there, on this and that.

Your gaze, a form of blessing.

Awake. Wee hours of the night. My bare feet find the floor, and I stand.

Stone quiet, except for two people breathing in this shared room. One of them, me. My husband’s uneven, heavy breaths together with my slow, soft in and out are a strange, hypnotic music.

More light in the livingroom than there should be. When I look, faint bars of light on the hardwood floor made by muted moonlight through the tall, wall of windows.

What else is here?

Looking out into the yard, one solar lantern still glows. The bronzy globe holds a punctured design, owls in flight among stars. The globe dangles slowly on it’s hook. On the sidewalk, owl shadows arc back and forth.

This is for you. Some voice in my head whispers.

I’m watching the globe, with its bright owls, sway. Watching the owl shadows, cast below, dance.

Both cats are curled in sleep, one on the couch, the other on a chair. I realize I hear their breaths, too. Faint, quick, fragile.

This is for you. All of it. For you.

Friday | April 25, 2025 from my journal

Does cat joy count?

Tired, so tired, I take the cats out into our deer-fenced yard for fresh air and pond time.

Spilling my body into a chair, wanting only to be a lizard, sun on my lizard skin, lizard eyes closed, I’m watching pinks, yellows, greens, magentas, blobs of color morphing and shape-shifting as light seeps through those two lids that are more like petals than anything reptilian.

Nearly dozing off, I hear bells jingling, approaching me fast. Tiny reindeer, my mind registers. Then, The cats. What’s happening with the cats?

My eyes flying open, sitting up straight, here come Tabby Boy and Torti Girl, the embodiment of glee, happy gratitude, and pure feline joy.

Trotting toward my feet, I see Tabby Boy has something furry and dangling in his mouth.

A chipmunk!

Crouching to grab the skin of my clearly proud tabby’s shoulders, I gently stroke his check, not wanting to punish—he’s just doing his cat ‘thing,’ right?—but also not wanting him to kill his catch.

“Okay, Little Hunter, you’re the cat man.” I tell him, “Now open your mouth and let the chipmunk go.”

Chipmunk is limp, though I can see still alive. I tug lightly at my tabby’s whiskers.

“Let the chipmunk go, Little Hunter,” I urge, calm but insistent. “No chipmunk wants to be in a cat’s mouth. Let’s all live to tell this story another day.”

Reluctantly, he releases. The chipmunk drops to the sidewalk, lying on his belly, neck wet, legs splayed out, dramatic as any victim at a crime seen.

Both cats and I wait … for movement. A long few moments. We all start to think, dead.

Well, I think, Damn, dead. The cats have no use for words, thinking with bodies that convey something more like, Damn, game over.

Suddenly Chipmunk is up, scuttling fast, zipping through ferns, winter-dried grasses, low clusters of heart-shaped violet leaves.

Both cats briefly confused, they start scrambling, instinctual, caught in the passion of pursuit.

Chipmunk is quick, pivoting and diving, jumping and dipping.

The cats keeps losing sight of their target, running in opposite directions only to turn back, slamming forehead into forehead in their desperate hunt, until they pause, tails whipping and fluffed out twice the normal size, noses tipped up to sniff, ears rotating and flinching to listen.

Where did Chipmunk go?

I’m laughing so hard.

Who needs reality TV when you have two housecats with ambitions bigger than themselves, bumbling about in the garden in a game of hide and seek with a chipmunk hyped-up on adrenaline?

A scratching sound coming from the side of the house, and we all look up.

Tiny but sharp chipmunk claws are holding our runaway friend, high under the eaves, safely out of reach.

Empathically, I feel into that small, striped body, wondering how he’s handling the trauma, how fast his chipmunk heart is beating, if he’s wounded and hurting, grateful now to be okay or . . . Do chipmunks get pissed off?

Is his clinging stance is pleading, Go away, please, let me live.

Or is he defiantly proclaiming, Not today, Suckers, not today.

Saturday | April 26, 2025 from my journal

My mother‘s birthday. She’d celebrate 88.

Grief is a shadow. Remembering, a form of light. So what is it between light and shadow, the shadow-maker, the source?

From my bookshelf, I lift a lovely bit of fabric and buttons, tiny beads, shades of purple, a square of muslin, four emboidered letters. J U D Y.

My mother was never one to be ordinary. No stick-on, clip-on, or pin-on name tags for her. What I hold in my hands is her version of an artsy name tag.

She wore it, like a necklace, when teaching—anything involving needle, fibers, and an urge to make what doesn’t yet exist. Quilting. Knitting. Beading. Embroidering. How to turn oddities scavenged from garage sales into beautiful bits of art, or at least, whimsy.

Moving to the window, I it hold up. Nothing but air and emptiness between the sewn pieces, the rattling of buttons, the dangling strings of beads that must have signaled, “Hello you, look at me … I’m Judy, let me share what I know with you.”

Ah, that’s the mistake. Thinking emptiness, thinking gone.

Longing, that’s the shadow-maker. Wanting 'what was' in one moment to be in this moment, which can only ever be 'what is.'

Not all shadows are dark, sad, or ominous.

Shadows protect what’s delicate from burning in the sun.

Shadows illuminate. Yes, really, through contrast, casting attention on texture, folds, furrows, angles, crevices, recesses, curves, bumps. Shadows ask, “Isn’t life more nuanced, dense, and lush because of me?”

Shadows also allow for not everything to be seen—giving space to surprise and imagination, a place for potential, waiting just off the beaten path. So best not to turn away.

Shadows give us: deer ferns and maidenhair ferns, mosses a million shades of green, wild ginger and redwood sorrel, earthworms, salamanders, shrews, Hermit thrushes, Saw-whet owls, Little brown bats, and certain moths, who despite their love of night, come to the window, wings tapping glass, drawn by your light.

Joy is a shadow, too.

Feeling the textures of cotton and muslin between my fingers and thumbs, I’m sniffing the the purples, lavenders, periwinkle blues. Listening to the buttons and beads as I shake this creation of my mother’s hands, her quirky mind, her always-broken heart.

Joy is this human capacity for connection, holding in my hands what her hands made. Holding her.

Then, among my thoughts, a question once asked by a client, “Do you think joy is big enough to hold the pain, too?”

How do you think I answered?

As my mother’s life unfolded, it became harder for her to say, “I love you.” I’m not sure if my sister or brother, 9 and 15 years younger than me, ever heard that.

When I was very little, she would say, “Don’t forget I love you,” before I headed to Kindergarten or into sleep. Before she tried to take her own life and for awhile after she came back from ‘treatment,’ including electroshock sessions.

The less she seemed to love herself, the more imaginative and gifted her creations became. Did she need to create to feel worthy of love, of receving it and also giving it?

To love outwardly, one needs to love inwardly. I know, sounds like some some social media meme. But. Still true.

Despite the complex relationship I had with my mother, I knew her love for me, for us, was there, faint and flickering as a flame, a little pilot light.

There are thousands of ways to speak your love.

Sometimes love is a reduction to what we most need.

For her, love became abbreviated. It only needed two words.

“Don’t forget.”

Sunday | April 27, 2025 from my journal

Snail shell, a spiral of browns on a piece of deeply weathered wood.

This length of split redwood left out through so many rainy nights, mornings, cycles of days getting shorter followed weeks of lengthening light. Years lying about, something forgotten.

Until a worker moved away brush and here it is. A piece of firewood.

You think, Shall we let its grey, dry grain bring us heat?

When you pick it up, surprise, you see something move, as if the wood has an eye, as if the wood is a being, that is, a body embraced by spirit, as if an attitude made visible.

What’s alive here?

You realize it is a snail shell and whatever lives within has tucked herself fully inside.

You hate the idea that some small part of the world is afraid of you.

Bringing the log over to ferns under a redwood, you set the wood down, squat still, watch.

You’re a patient person. You think, Peace, Hidden One. You wonder if a woman and a snail can be friends.

You think, Be calm. That thought’s for you and for Snail.

You feel wind chill your cheeks, hear wind in the trees going, Hushshshsh and Hoooohhhh.

Soon tiny antlers on a brown, wet body peek out from the shell. Soon she climbs down from that old piece of wood, seeking shadows and finding them.

Theoretically the moment is over.

You can take the wood now, but you squat a little longer.

Why? Now you share a secret.

There’s a hidden life, carrying its whorled home into ferns, sliding from this moment into the next. Into a world and a life low to the ground that you can never really know.

Oddly this truth is comforting, that the invisible can still be real.

It’s not for you understand what that life is, only that it is.

Doesn’t that feel happy?

Wednesday | April 30, 2025 from my journal

We think the world is out there. Maybe.

The heart is not so different from the snail’s shell, it’s chambers, turning inward, something alive deep inside, unseen.

The mind is not the brain. Does that surprise you?

I believe in science as much as spirit, yet neither knows the answer to the question: What is the mind?

Might as well ask, What is the snail?

Not the shimmery horned being pulling herself forward on one leg, taking her coiled bit of calcium carbonate, her private portable cave, wherever she goes.

No, I mean the pull itself, the drive, the the stamina of hope, the desire to keep inching forward.

What if a snail is only a thought?

Admit it, as you’ve been reading these words, are you not thinking of a snail? Hasn’t she already left a glimmering trail in your mind?

What if stepping out there is also stepping in here?

What if your mind and mine are actually one, and the snail is it part of it, too?

One mind.

What if solitude is a gathering?

What if this joy I’m experiencing, not only in my body and among my emotions, I share through the mind?

Can you see this joy, feel it, or most important of all, believe in it?

Practicing 3 ways of being with joy + Today's question for you

As you think about how inner joy, well-being, delight, peace, lightheartedness, and other luminous experiences show up, it starts by being in at least in one of three states of open possibility.

I call these open states: being a hunter, a gardener, or a lantern-bearer.

When you are a hunter, you look for joy or what might bring joy. Every sense is alive and aware, scanning the terrain where outer and inner worlds meet until something sweet and smiling unlocks. You might say, I found joy.

When you are a gardner, you’re cultivating the moment, intentionally creating the conditions for joy, or whatever nurturing experience you want more of, to germinate, emerge, and sweep you off your mental or emotional feet. You might say, I felt joy.

When you are a lantern-bearer, you’re simply sharing your own unique light of being, of being you, fully and unapologetically you, drawing beauty and grace, humility and opportunity toward you by giving joy, which in the process, lets joy find you. You might say, I am joy.

All of these states, these ways of allowing joy, inviting joy, into your days can be practiced. Often we tend to fall into one mode or another.

Being a hunter is most common and a lantern-bearer least, mainly because we forget we can be a source of joy for others and for ourselves.

By practicing and growing your capacity to embody all three—hunter, gardener, lantern-bearer—you create the greatest potential for true inner joy, contentment, surprise, optimism, creativity, curiosity, purpose, resilience, and resonating deeply with your own alive-ness.

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.