LIFE AS MYTH
JOURNAL
JOURNAL 2024
Of wonder
AUTUMN 2024
Finding joy
LIFEWORKS
ATLAS
AUTUMN 2024
FINDING JOY
Truth, Goodness, Beauty -- those celestial thrins,
Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,
With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,
Its joy confesses at their recent birth.
The journals of Henry David Thoreau [June 14, 1838]
Someone in the southeastern United States recently bought one of my paintings and yesterday I mailed it to him. In order to save shipping costs, I packed the box myself. The end result weighed just over seven pounds and measured an unwieldy 33" by 41" by 3". In other words, though light in weight, the box was still long enough and wide enough to be extremely difficult to carry. Unwieldy-ness notwithstanding, since the Fed Ex satellite store was only a few blocks away, I decided to carry it there myself.
While making my way up Broadway, the box slipped and shifted constantly. I tried several ways of carrying it but none worked for very long. Finally I had an inspiration and lifted the box up to my head and in that way I successfully made it to the Fed Ex store. What a comical sight I must have made, like some Dr. Seuss imagining -- a quite tall, so freckled, white lady with a box growing out of her head.
Which brings me to what happened yesterday on the way to the Fed ex store: I experienced the workings of my mythic eye. My lens on the world is my "mythic eye." That means I tend to use symbols and metaphors when interpreting the world around me. And yesterday my mythic eye contemplated the spectacle of walking down Broadway with a box growing out of my head and saw something larger.
It's kind of hard to explain but in that particular moment I felt connected to other women, possibly all other women, women and how they work through their day, whether raising children or governing countries or walking around with boxes on their head. And I saw my part in that bigger picture as both unique and yet also universal. For a few moments I experienced the beautiful groove of my life and how amazing that felt to be in it. And interestingly, I understood in that moment that joy is not only found at my easel -- but it is also found in the simplest experiences of everyday life.
Life as Myth, Collected writings, Usher. (2006 - ). Adapted from a 2006 essay.
EEG: a measure of Joy. Usher. 2013. Private collection.
Henry David Thoreau was an essayist and poet, influential to Mahatma Gandhi's thinking on passive resistance.
