the book of joy and sadness
I’ve been reading “The Book of Joy,” about five days the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent together. Both in their eighties, their friendship is relatively recent, yet open, warm, and blatantly affectionate. Archbishop Tutu had invited the Dalai Lama to his 80th birthday some four years previous; the Chinese government had decided the meeting of these leaders should be prevented, and so, pressuring the South African government, the Dalai Lama was denied a travel visa. Now four years later, the Chinese government could not stop Archbishop Tutu from attending the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday celebration – in Dharamsala, India, where he lives in exile. And so Tutu arrived, and the two spiritual brothers spent their days together discussing the nature of suffering, and of joy. Joy’s path, they found, led through the valley of sorrow and grief, that deep place where compassion is born.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jacky has been missing for weeks. Many weeks. His mommy has been distraught. All the usual steps have been taken since he’s gone missing. A reward was even offered for his safe return, a last desperate offer like a sobbing plea to an indifferent god.
The grassy courtyard of our apartment complex has been eerily quiet…except for tentative bird calls, one to another, wondering if it was safe to come out.
The “Missing” posters blanketed our neighborhood – on the mailboxes, lightpoles, seemed like on every corner. You’d turn, and there’s Jacky…except, of course, Jacky’s not there.
In the poster photo, his inky black hair stuck out, unruly and shining; his dark eyes didn’t miss a thing. Jacky’s picture on the missing poster was not adorable, though; I mean maybe it was, I wouldn’t know, really. Because Jacky’s a damn cat, and I don’t like cats.
To be fair, I don’t like dogs, either. It’s all of them; I’m anti-pet. I love wildlife instead. Pets drive wildlife away. Pets often kill wildlife.
And Jacky killed birds. My birds. The birds in the long-needled pine tree by my porch, in the gambel oak outside my living room window. He and his adopted brother, Elron, a hefty kitty with dull, crossed eyes, oddly split paws like baseball mitts, and long, cream-colored fur, roamed the tiny courtyard like a hairy George and Lenny from “Of Mice and Men,” Jacky doing all the smooth talking, Elron petting the birds a little too hard.
Yeah, but Jacky was the killer. And I really detested him for that. That and he loved to poop in my tiny garden along the back wall. But so did Lenny. I mean Elron. Whoever. It killed my flowers and rendered my herbs inedible, showered and over-fertilized as they were with cat urine and feces.
The damn cats didn’t even live indoors. Their mommy, a sweet young woman who lives a couple apartments down from me, called them in each evening as she came home from work, a high soprano singsong of their names: “Jack? Jacky? Jacky Jack? Elron?” Why do cat people always call their cats in with that operatic falsetto of endearment? And why was Elron always an afterthought? He was probably sitting right there near her porch and she didn’t notice him; Elron’s kind of like that. Anyway, she’d call them in and feed them and cuddle them or whatever you do with cats, and then in the morning, there they always were, huddled in the courtyard grass, Jacky looking guilty and defiant, Elron always kind of dozy and confused. I’d look at them, distrustful, then sigh, locking my door and going off to work.
It’s when I would come home from work that Jacky’s surprises waited for me. A wet pile of cedar mulch in the middle of my otherwise dry garden. Beside my sunny back steps, the delicious smell of warm cat poop, a place NOT to sit and relax after work. My front porch mat wadded from a leaping cat landing on it and skidding across my porch into the large potted plant (that one seemed like Elron, to be honest). Shredded spider plants or similar potted spikes if I left them out to get sun and air. And my favorite: stepping into the courtyard and stumbling on the scene of a grizzly crime, a dead bird clutched in black cat claws on the grass in front of my porch, the body reluctantly abandoned without haste or remorse as I came up the walk.
I shook my keys at Jacky, who bolted away.
Sigh.
Then over the winter holidays, the unthinkable happened: Jacky disappeared. Unthinkable for his mommy, and probably for Elron; for me, Christmas had come early. I’m not a cat killer or someone who sets out traps for strays and calls Animal Control. Cats aren’t worth all that bother. Besides, more will just come to take their place anyway. I was just so glad not to interact with Jacky for weeks. Months. Nearly a season without him.
I went to work, I came home: no garden piles. I traveled, I returned: all was as I left it. I passed an electrical box on my walk to work that had graffiti written on it in black script: RIP gato. A small smile would tug at my lips.
But as the weeks continued, the corner posters began to feel somewhat sad. RIP, gato, I’d think when I saw them on my way to the market, knowing by now that no reward would bring Jacky back. When my neighbor came home in the evenings, she just called out quietly, “Elron…,” who, being Elron, was always right there, waiting for her. No real need to call.
I wondered how she was doing, Jacky’s mommy. Would she adopt another stray? And how was Lenny functioning without his George?
I came home one evening to find Elron sitting awkwardly on my porch, almost hanging off into the periwinkle vines. Cat didn’t even know how to sit lazily on a porch without Jacky. I shook my keys at Elron. He slowly turned one of his eyes to look in my direction, his gaze unfocused. “Go on,” I said, which he did not understand. I waved my hands at him. No response. Elron had either had the most loving upbringing of any cat ever or he had significant brain damage. I walked past him to my front door, turning the key in the deadbolt. He rose expectantly.
“No. Go home,” I said, and used my bag to slowly steer him toward the stairs. He plopped down onto the periwinkle instead, missing the steps. I felt bad for him. “Go home,” I told him again, bothered by his incapacity. He looked up at me and then all around the courtyard, confused. For a minute, I wondered if he was looking for Jacky. I went inside and closed the door.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“One is reminded of one’s humanity and one’s fragility,” said Archbishop Tutu. Relationships, loss, sorrow; sometimes, we find ourselves like Elron, don’t even know how to sit lazily on our porches for the weight of our heavy hearts. We look around our homes and all that is familiar, and we feel confused, bereft. Or like Mommy, all the musical trill gone out of her voice, calling without really calling, gathering without joy.
Tutu advised, “…I think we shouldn’t think we are superwomen and supermen. To hold down emotions in a controlled environment, as it were, is not wise. I would say go ahead and even maybe shout out your sadness and pain. This can bring you back to normal. It’s locking them up and pretending that they are not there that causes them to fester and become a wound.”
The Dalai Lama added, “When I used to get angry, I would shout,” describing his younger days. “When anger develops, think, what is the cause? And then also think, what will be the result of my anger, my angry face, my shouting?” He advises training our minds to take this step back, examining anger as a cover story, an arrow pointing back toward an earlier fear or hurt, disappointment. Toward our sadness.
The writer who recorded their conversations, Douglas Abrams, explained further:
Sadness is seemingly the most direct challenge to joy, but as the Archbishop argued strongly, it often leads us most directly to empathy and compassion and to recognizing our need for one another.
Sadness is a very powerful and enduring emotion. In one study it was found that sadness lasted many times longer than more fleeting emotions like fear and anger: while fear lasted on average thirty minutes, sadness often lasted up to a hundred and twenty hours, or almost five days.
…Sadness is in many ways the emotion that causes us to reach out to one another in support and solidarity.
Archbishop Tutu had said it clearly: “…I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.” Later in their conversations, he added, “It is the hard times, the painful times, the sadness and the grief that knit us more closely together.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
The cold weather had retreated, and I sat curled lazily on my couch, still reading “The Book of Joy” by the warm light of Sunday’s late afternoon. A car parked out front, and then I heard Mommy’s high-pitched glee: “Jack? Jacky!”
Jacky Jack the Black Cat was back.
I half-rose from the couch, stretching to look out the porch window. There he was, arrogantly poised in the grassy courtyard, much to my neighbor’s utter relief and joy. She chattered happily along the sidewalk and back to her door, offering food, treats, love and affection.
I felt a small smile tugging at my lips. As I took my trash out along the back sidewalk before going to work Monday morning, I found a huge pile of wet mulch in my garden. Damn cat. All was right in our little world.
You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The ultimate source of happiness is within us.
— HH Fourteenth Dalai Lama