Sometimes joy starts with wonder

For those new to The Wild Now, welcome to a tiny, month-long experiment I’m calling, The Joy Experiment. You can learn more it about by checking out previous issues below. The ‘experiment’ began on April 1st, with a piece about tapping the mind to help us cultivate inner joy and well-being.

Have you been visiting your ‘mind’s green meadow’ as your inner refuge for solace, peace, and access to joy?

What does it look like or feel like? What’s there with you? Is it even a meadow? Or might your place be a forest, the edge of the ocean, somewhere that looks a lot like a corner of your garden, or does it, as one reader shared in a comment, include a waterfall?

The power of the mind both to create space for joy to emerge and to be open and alert to ordinary moments that contain surprise, beauty, curiosity, delight, and so much more, even that elusive inner joy, is core to our experiment.

As promised, below I’m sharing a couple of ‘joy moments’ from my personal journal this week. I’ve been capturing a few each day, and these two I’m sharing just happen to be from the same day.

The goal in sharing? To help you explore some of the ordinary moments of your day where a bit of joy, peace, or lightheartedness may be waiting for you.

Wednesday, April 2, 2025 | A morning moment

Stepping out the door, the morning light just a suggestion, a low glow through the redwoods, my right foot stops. Hovers. Briefly my balance off, until toe and heal touch down beside what my body senses as something moving.

I lean down to look. What is it?

Yellow with many wings fluttering. Then I see small, probing antlers (technically optical tentacles), and the pudgy, legless, sluggy form.

But what are these wings?

I smile as words reflexively tumble from my mouth.

“A banana slug with flower petals stuck to her!”

A low, little wind is blowing the petals. Believe it or not, a banana slug can be adorable.

Last night I’d placed a vase of wilting Inca lilies (Alstroemeria) just outside the door to take to the compost pile today. It’s toppled over, and apparently my slug friend has been rooting in the remains.

This is a moment to pause. The wonder of it all feels good, feels happy.

I squat like a toddler, watching her-him (banana slugs are hermaphrodites) lumber and pulse along. The delicate petals billowing, quick and crazy—it's a wild scene in an otherwise still dawn.

Does she realize she’s become a petaled being? Could she lift up her sticky body and let herself fly?

Her shimmery yellow form glides along as if a tiny yellow ship with pink and white sails.

I right the vase and put what’s left of the stems and blossoms back in it, then go put suet out for the birds who’ll arrive later. Heading back into the house, it occurs to me to find my phone and get a picture of my floral slug.

Coming back out, she’s gone. But not entirely gone.

On the decking, looking at just the right angle, I see her pathway, a slight glistening, wonderfully non-linear, curving and winding—little explorer!—disappearing through a gap in two boards.

Whoever we love and have lost is like this. A glistening path through our life that lingers.

Wednesday, April 2, 2025 | A late afternoon moment

Bringing kindling and a satchel of firewood into the the livingroom, I gaze at my husband, stretched out in his recliner.

Feeling more unwell each day, spirits dipping as he gets closer to his life’s ending, he’s been dozing much of this afternoon. His body, not able to regulate temperature too well, he’s beneath a blanket pulled up under his beard, with just one leg and arm uncovered.

He must have had a heat wave, I think, then got cold.

Chestnut-backed chickadees, Gray jays, one Purple finch, and the first Goldfinches take turns at the suet and bird feeders just outside the glassdoor beside him. He’s birder who can’t go birding, so I make sure birds come him (and to me, too).

The telly is blaring. As if end-stage heart disease and advancing years aren’t enough, his hearing has greatly dimmed. Yet, it’s my quietly setting down the wood on the hearth that seems to awaken him … or perhaps more likely, my felt presence now in the room.

Just as we catch each others’ eyes, a commercial with salsa music booms out loud, rhythmical and lively.

My body, way ahead of my brain, decided entirely on it’s own to break into a silly, overdone salsa dance, wobbling my knees together, swirling my hips, with right hand over my heart, and left hand up and pointing to the ceiling.

I’m trilling and rattling my tongue, calling out, “Para tu, mi amor,” watching my husband’s surprised face. He’s laughing so hard, outloud, belly-laughing, and then crying, tears-on-cheeks crying.

Stepping and swaying closer, I ask if the tears are from laughing or if they’d turned to another kind of tear. He says, “I don’t know. It feels good to laugh, so good to laugh, and to see my beautiful and funny wife, knowing this is what I’m leaving.”

This is the joy in sorrow—poignant and sweet and aching.

This is the joy in being here now, knowing it will, as poet Jane Kenyon put it, someday be otherwise.

I kiss him on the forehead, and salsa backwards, kicking up my feet, spinning circles, singing, “Sólo ahora, mi amor, sólo ahora.” He has no idea what I’m saying, and maybe I mean those words, “only now,” for me.

I keep dancing, if you can call it that, through another commercial and another. A wife-caregiver is also an entertainer and spirit-lifter, yes?

Then, making a fire in the woodstove, feeling energized, panting a bit, as my husband laughs and cries, I’m trying to memorize all of this, every detail, hold on to it, put it in the secure safe of my mind.

I’ll need this moment again someday when there will be no one but the cats to surprise with an impromptu salsa.

The power of wonder and slowing down

You can create moments, you can discover moments, and you can do a mix of both to let joy emerge in your day.

Having an intention to pay attention—to slow down your routine, to be open to how you might lean into a moment and see what’s there—is how you begin to tap into and deepen your inner joy even in the midst of loss.

When you're in the moment, be fully in the moment.

Take in all the details, the sensations of it, and see if you can set it in your mind so you can come back to it as another kind of refuge.

Having a sense of play and maybe a willingness to look foolish helps :-)

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.