The Joke That Got Me Cancelled (Again)

If you don't have a sense of humor, it's just not funny.

Play, Joy, Practice and Activism

Recently, I spent the weekend at a community gathering focused on singing. I had imagined attending all the sessions, learning lots of new songs to nourish my heart.

I thought I'd get really embodied through entraining by singing with others. I imagined embodiment would be the thing.

Instead, I played all weekend. A group of playful friends came too, including clowns who once non-consensually inducted me into their siblinghood.

The organizers of the event were clear: they are creating a new culture, which they call "the village," requiring great unlearning of patriarchy and supremacy culture, and new learning about how we fit together in life-affirming ways that honor collective good.

All of which I am firmly behind.

But after the fifth or sixth time hearing it, it became background noise.

Many of us had been in radical spaces before. We knew how to ask for consent, center marginalized voices, and uplift the edges.

So while important, some of us were, dare I say, a bit bored. Instead of attending singing circles, we respectfully gathered in meadows and forests and just played.

Play disrupts the mundane.

We didn’t use substances. No drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. Minimal caffeine. But my experience, and that of my beloveds, was of being significantly altered. Higher than a kite.

There was no cell service, so we couldn't check out on our phones. We were far in the woods, away from businesses, stores, and theaters. All there was were the people and the nature.

We played across generations, made up our own rules, and welcomed everyone in. Some games were open to all. Other games required navigating the uncertainty of not knowing who was in charge or whether you were included.

Sometimes, we played organized games.

Sometimes, clowning and making up ridiculous scenarios with complicated rules that were constantly broken and reinvented.

On our last day, we ended with a spontaneous clown council set in the imaginary future, reflecting on everything that had happened.

A list of banned words emerged that could not be used in circles at all, ever, including: process, needs, village, love, sacred.

We laughed about the makeover of the registration booth into the cancellation station, where you got cancelled when you arrived.

We wrote on bits of paper how someone might have gotten cancelled, folded them up, put them in a hat, drew them out, and, without looking, licked the paper and stuck it to our own foreheads.

The emergent rules included walking around, encountering others, and trying to figure out why you were cancelled, while others avoided you and worked out why they were cancelled.

We laughed until snot ran down from our noses and our bellies ached with pain and delight.

Fun creates community.

The fun I had happened through collective practice.

We all decided our intention had shifted from singing to playing.

Play became the root of all our interactions.

Long discourses on the Enneagram were interrupted with jokes. We traded core wounds, made up new identities, and processed the amenities of the gathering.

How would I experience the food if I had a wound of not belonging?

What about the composting toilets through the lens of betrayal?

Joy restores our humanity.

Edgy play made jokes about where the line was. Is it here? What about here? The line is definitely aliens, right? Or fake science pretending to be real? Where is that line?

In deep play, the line blurs.

Where does funny start? Where does healing begin? Where do we mock the parts of us that are overly serious, deeply dogmatic? Can we get made fun of for the thing that is our line and stay connected? Can we trust that love for one another enables the kind of teasing we wouldn’t allow outside of friendship?

My friend, knowing I can be intimacy-averse, especially in tantra-esque settings, asked if I would eye-gaze for an hour with him. It was a joke at my expense, and it was funny. I returned the joke, poking fun at an eye defect he has, which he is a bit sensitive about. "Give me that good old droopy eye!" I spat.
Had I crossed the line?

A beat.

"How many times can I hear that and laugh?" he asked. "One, I think." And laughed.

The kind of play I’m talking about isn’t always sweet, but it does see us. It points at our wounds with clarity and gentleness. Hearing the line, I didn’t push it. Play isn’t fun when you’re being an asshole.

I tell this story because joy is not always gentle. It is not always light. But in cracked-open play, sometimes you can name the thing, and it's okay.

Lightheartedness is necessary.

Back in the day, during a messy, painful divorce, it became clear to me that I was the one responsible for the quality of my life. I remember standing outside the school bus I was living in, facing into the California January sun, breathing in the light and warmth.

Around this time, someone handed me the phrase, "the artist of my own life."

I was the artist of my own life, responsible for my happiness and satisfaction. No one was coming to save me.

I had to find joy in the midst of a terrible time, or not. It was on me.

To move forward, raising two kids on my own with no job and no permanent home, I needed to be resourced. I needed to feel light and joy inside my own heart. The other way, being angry, bitter, and resentful, had made me physically ill. There was no way I would get through intact without figuring out how to lighten up.

These days call for lightheartedness on a collective level.

This is not the worst it's ever been, even if it feels like it. Our ancestors survived similar times. Our forebears had skills of community and interdependency that we can relearn.

Without lightheartedness, we muddle through, but for the sake of what? The genocide in Palestine ends, or doesn’t end, but has our own heavy-heartedness contributed in any positive way?

I use that as an example, but the same is true for many crises.

How does heavy-heartedness serve the revolution? How does it create lasting change? Or does it just make us feel like we are doing our part by feeling the weight of the world in response to our powerlessness and smallness?

"We have to pay attention to joy. Otherwise, we will spiral into despair. The world does not need people in despair. Nothing is going to get better in despair." ~Leadership coach Karen Walrond

Joy is a temporary guesthouse you inhabit, not a destination you arrive at and never leave.

Think about all the ways you have felt just this morning. We have such a huge range of emotions. I believe it's important to feel all the feelings. Some are not better than others.

But most of us have habituated feelings. For some, anger. For others, fear. Others are joyful. What’s most important is having the capacity to feel the full range. Joy is not a goal as in "I will be a joyful human forever and always," but rather, "I am a person who sometimes feels joyful."

When was the last time you felt joyful?

Are you practicing?

Joy is a practice.

Sometimes, joy arrives unbidden. But not usually. Usually, I have to at least make the effort of opening the door for it to come in. So I practice.

I have many joy practices, including clowning, singing and dancing, moving my body, whispering to the mystery "I don't know," and seeing what happens next. I am a joy practitioner, maybe only because if I don't practice, I'm not joyful. And when I'm not joyful, everything feels sad and serious, and I don’t want to be here anymore.

Everything is a practice. You practice all the time, every day. But most of the time, you’re not consciously practicing. You’re just doing what you do.

Change becomes possible with practice over time. Choosing what to practice, which can be anything, is wonderful freedom.

You get to choose what you practice.

Joy can be one of your practices.

If you were going to practice joy today, what might you do? Looking at the clouds is a joy practice. Connecting with a friend. Singing in the shower. Practice is best when it is small and simple and doesn’t require special equipment or a lot of time.

I have a "wonderful list" practice I do sometimes. In the morning, I write a list of three to five things I will do that day that make my life more wonderful. At the top is often something like, "Look at my garden" or "Text Kendra."

Practice used to be hard for me. I used to resist it because I didn’t want to be accountable to myself. If I didn’t practice, I didn’t fail. I pre-failed.

For kids who had practice forced on them (mine was piano), I feel for you. It gives practice a bad rap. Something to resist. Something to define yourself in opposition to.

So, how do you build a practice of joy, because you know you need it, but you resist practicing?

Whenever I'm struggling to do a practice, I ask a series of questions:

1. Do I have enough structure?

2. Do I have enough support?

3. Is this the right practice for this time?

Usually, my difficulties with practice are about not having enough structure or support. Something wonderful about practice is that it builds on itself. The more you practice, the better you get.

No one likes sucking at a new thing, so there is a period of agreeing to suck. That is a wall you have to get over.

Once you do, practice reinforces itself. To get over that initial wall, community and other structures are huge.

---

Want to practice joy as activism in real time?

Join me for Joy as Activism Week at Camp LightHeart, starting Monday.

This week focuses on building a joyful practice in community. We’ll lean into silliness, connection, and showing up even when things feel heavy.

This week, we make joy a daily ritual, for ourselves, and the world we long to build.

We’ll build practices and routines that center what matters and create embodied play rituals we use to anchor our activism.

For people who crave a daily practice (spiritual or otherwise) but struggle to make it stick.

Camp is pay-what-you-can.

Joy is not a solo project. Let's practice it together.

All love,