tidings of joy
I’d like to tell you about impossibilities. I live in the hottest desert in North America, yet, we pick oranges in January. Out in my yard a giant succulent named fire stick ought to be green all year, but it turns bright orange in December. Flowers put forth their most glorious blooms in winter, die in springtime. Just today I noticed someone hanging a bunch of Christmas ornaments from their low growing palm tree. That palm tree has no business in the desert. I see it as a little people’s rebellion against the cactus. The impossible is made possible by the choices of people. If we weren’t watering the plants, nothing but cactus and scrub brush would grow let alone oranges and flowers in winter.
There’s a famous native cactus known as the jumping cholla (choi-ya.) Growing thickly in vast stretches of desert landscape, it doesn’t need any extra water to survive. Fat knobby segments look fuzzy and soft to the touch, but anyone unlucky enough to brush up against it will soon find out the opposite. The Jumping Cholla is covered in poisonous barbed spines. The more you try to rid yourself of the stinging thorns, the more imbedded they become
For a long, long, time, my life was as dry as the Sonoran desert and my heart filled with the barbs of trauma. It didn’t matter how things were going in my life, no accomplishment made any difference and normal bumps in the road were difficult to manage. Trauma changes our perception turning everything into a wasteland. Happiness may float in once in awhile, but the jumping cholla of trauma chokes out anything good—especially joy.
But this is a story of opposites and impossibilities. Joy can and does exist despite the wasteland of trauma. It does not matter what you have been through. It does not matter how bad things are right now. It doesn’t matter if getting free of trauma seems impossible. You are still you and there is enough left to save.
Joy is a by-product of the inner life. When we bring life-giving water to the desert of our heart impossible things begin to occur. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.” Drip, drip, drip. “I’m going to change my life.” Drip drip drip, “I’m going to break the family system.” Drip drip drip, “I will seek to water my inner life with beauty and love.” Drip, drip, drip. “I’m going to choose the kind of Christmas that will bring me joy.” The drip turns into a stream. “I’m going to choose to put in place the people and activities that will help me heal.” Now the stream becomes a quiet pool, filled with living water healing places we thought were long dead.
The joy of Christmas is real and attainable. But we must do the opposite of what trauma demands. Isolate? Be intentional about relationships. Go numb? Listen to your heart. Driven behavior? Sit in the quiet. This is what it really means to defy trauma and little by little you’ll be able to embrace the thing we’re all after—joy!
