On being ross gay
In our world of so much suffering, it can touch hard or false to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles.
Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle.
We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as excellent at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating for what we love, for what we find pretty and necessary. But without this, he says, we cannot speak meaningfully even about our longings for a more just world, a more whole being for all. To understand that we are all suffering — and so to practice tenderness and mercy — is a quality of what Ross calls “adult joy." Starting with his cherished essay collection The Book of Delights, he began to accompany many in an everyday spiritual discipline of practicing delight and cultivating joy.
Ross Homosexual is a poet, essayist, teacher, a
Seattle Arts and Lectures
Next on the SAL Podcast: Ross Gay
April 9,
In our latest episode of SAL/on air, our literary podcast featuring talks from across Seattle Arts & Lectures’ thirty years, we learn from poet Ross Gay.
In a time like this, where do you glare to for joy? In an episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, On Being, poet Ross Gay recently said, “It is happiness by which the labor that will make the life that I hope for, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”
Besides being a disciple of joy, Ross Gay is a gardener, a painter, a professor, a basketball player, and a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a free-fruit-for-all non-profit focused on food, justice, and joy. He is also the author of three collections of poetry.
The title poem in his most recent, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, is a prolonged piece which, Ross told the Los Angeles Times, was begun as a “way to publicly dream what it means for a person to be adamantly in love with his life. I wanted to realize joy as a fundamental aspect of
“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone state came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a mentor, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, connect.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest untamed in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we affection, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just tell dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our i Seattle Arts and Lectures
Ross Gay
In a time like this, where do you view to for joy? In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, On Being, poet Ross Lgbtq+ said, “It is happiness by which the labor that will make the life that I desire, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”
Besides being a disciple of joy, Ross Gay is a gardener, a painter, a professor, a basketball player, and a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a free-fruit-for-all non-profit focused on food, justice, and joy. He is the author of three collections of poetry. The title poem in his most recent, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, is a drawn-out piece which, Gay told the Los Angeles Times, was begun as a “way to publicly conceive what it means for a person to be adamantly in love with his life. I wanted to realize joy as a fundamental aspect of our lives and exercise it as a discipline.”
Read a full transcript of Gay&#;s reading here.
Season Two
Air Date April 9,
Audio from lecture: Ross Gay
Recorded February 7,
at McCaw
Seattle Arts and Lectures
Ross Gay
In a time like this, where do you view to for joy? In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, On Being, poet Ross Lgbtq+ said, “It is happiness by which the labor that will make the life that I desire, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”
Besides being a disciple of joy, Ross Gay is a gardener, a painter, a professor, a basketball player, and a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a free-fruit-for-all non-profit focused on food, justice, and joy. He is the author of three collections of poetry. The title poem in his most recent, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, is a drawn-out piece which, Gay told the Los Angeles Times, was begun as a “way to publicly conceive what it means for a person to be adamantly in love with his life. I wanted to realize joy as a fundamental aspect of our lives and exercise it as a discipline.”
Read a full transcript of Gay&#;s reading here.
Season Two
Air Date April 9,
Audio from lecture: Ross Gay
Recorded February 7,
at McCaw