Krista Tippett: Our teacher for this session is an ornithologist and wildlife ecologist, and also a poet. I spoke with Drew Lanham while we were still in lockdown in the U.S. We talked about birds. We talked about his memoir, The Homeplace: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. We talked about how he’s living in this time. I came out refreshed and wiser about humanity and about life, and about joy as a spiritual practice, even and especially in the hardest of times — the hardest of times, like the times we’re living through now.

Drew Lanham wrote a piece in 2020, called “Elegy in Three Plagues,” about this time. I do want to note, because journaling is something that we encourage in these courses, that he wrote this piece out of journals that he was keeping. After he described, in a way that I just did in shorthand, this time of multiple rupture, multiple plagues, he had this sentence: “Our task, then, has been pathfinding through the improbable without ending up at the inevitable.”

He said that that is now a daily task, because all of those things — and he’s using ecological imagery — all of those things have tossed down in the trail in front of you. They’ve fallen like trees. They’re coming down the upslope, down toward you like rocks that have been knocked loose by something up there, and you don’t know what it is. And you’ve got to try to get through all of that. You knew the trail may be rocky, but you never thought it would get this rocky. And so here you are. So how do you get through that improbable?

Drew Lanham goes on to write about — even as he thinks of these things as plagues — he recalls his grandmother with whom he lived for a lot of his childhood. He said she always used to talk about the end of the world. And he reflects on how his ancestors must have thought of chattel slavery as a plague. He asks, How do you get through that? For my parents, how did they get through Jim Crow? How do people who are abused get through the day in tough times, not knowing where the blows will come from? Trying to get through all of this, he says, is a practice. And it’s not always easy, something that seems like an uphill hike in mud.

I’m setting that scene for you because it is illuminating and wise and helpful, in its way — clarity is helpful, somebody telling it like it is is helpful — but also because, from here, my conversation with Drew Lanham ventured into the unlikely, you might say improbable, yet redemptive territory of joy.

Tippett: One of the themes that’s come through in a lot of conversations I’ve had — in the last couple of years, actually — is the relationship that it almost feels countercultural and almost dubious to talk about, the relationship between justice and joy and the importance of knowing what you love in order to have the resilience and in order to be able to know what you need to fight and what needs to be rebuilt and remade. And obviously, you take joy in being an ornithologist, and you’ve also said — and you actually say, as a scientist, this is almost not a scientific statement — that you “hear joy in birdsong.”

Lanham: Well, I do think that joy, in part, is the justice we give ourselves. And for me, the songs of birds are important. They signal the beginning of the day and the end of it, and what birds are doing in their lives and carrying on.

But I think joy must be something — you try to have joy as something that no one can take from you, that it’s something that you can hoard and you can hold in your heart, in a way, and you can protect that joy in a way that, when all of those things on this rough-trod trail around you are threatening you, that you at some quiet moment can pull that joy out and experience it, and even if it’s just for a moment.

That’s the bird flying through the yard. That’s the cardinal. That’s the song. That’s the memory of something good that you say, you know what?

For me, I have to find those moments daily. And again, it’s a struggle sometimes, to endure all of this stuff and to say, “Ah, there it is.” You know, as you said, that bird — ”Look at that! Look at that.”

I’ve had those days where nothing is going right, and then it seems like there’s more coming that’s going to go wrong. But in that moment of that little brown bird that’s always so inquisitive, that sings reliably — in that moment that I’m thinking about that wren, I’m not thinking about anything else. That’s joy.

Sometimes we have to recognize the joy that the world didn’t give us and that the world can’t take away, in the midst of the world taking away what it can. And as hard as it is to say, to find it — sometimes it’s in a song. My grandmother sometimes would just sing, and that was her joy, or just hum.

Tippett: How do those wrens sound in your backyard?

Lanham: Oh gosh. One of their songs is this teakettle song, this teakettle-teakettle-tea, teakettle-teakettle-teakettle-tea! It’s one of the first songs that you hear in the morning, but wrens sing all year long. What I know now is that as the days get incrementally longer, their songs get stronger. Sometime in March, when we’re marking a year, really, from when backyards became our bastions of quarantine, that those wrens will begin to build nests. And they’ll begin this cycle of making more of themselves. And in that, there’s some hope. There’s some joy. There is some inspiration for looking forward.

[music]

Tippett: Joy is the justice we give ourselves — the joy that no one can take from you.

It’s hard not to be inspired by Drew, by how he finds that so lavishly, with such delight. And it seems such a constant state of discovery, no matter how much he knows and learns, what birds are doing in their lives and in his backyard. He enters that world that gives him joy — the sound of it, the intricacy of it, which brings him joy.

You might take this session as an invitation to take the natural world, in the days to come — to see it as, very actively, as a contemplative space, a spiritual practice; being present to it.

Maybe that’s something you already do. I think it’s something that many of us discovered or rediscovered, if we were fortunate enough to be surrounded by nature or were proximate to it in this time.

The underlying invitation here is to ponder what that joy is for you that the world cannot touch, cannot take away. Contemplate that and dwell with it and work with that awareness. Treasure it. Turn it into spiritual practice. As Drew said, find those moments daily. And look for those moments in what is common.

I use that language of what is common, also, coming out of something that Drew was describing to me: in quarantine, in the pandemic, he said he would in other years have been heading off on his “migratory” period to study birds all over the place. But in quarantine, he was denied the exotic birds he would’ve gone to watch, and he was left with the birds in his own backyard: cardinals, common birds, which his grandmother called redbirds.

And he said watching a redbird as the sun would go down and watching a bird sit in the last shafts of sunlight gave him this appreciation, again, for things we often pass by, even things we think we are attending to — that when we call things “common” we start, in our minds and our imaginations, dismissing them. But when we start noticing again, there are these moments of saying, Oh! There it is. Look at that.

That’s the invitation. That’s the finding in moments, daily. And we are going to take that as our Pause practice.

Enjoy, and I will meet you again when you’re ready to keep going.