En/In Joy

When you have lived in the kingdom of the sick for as long as I have (42 years and counting) it’s all too easy to dismiss your body yelling at you as “same old, same old”.  Sometimes, however, those signals mean that the same-old has mutated into something new. I’m used to having my life constrained by pain; since early 2025, these constraints have multiplied. The days where I can accomplish things have shrunk to hours. Projects I had hoped to start have been postponed.

Anyone who knows me can attest that, despite my best efforts at radical acceptance and meditation, I’m more like the early version of Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk: my secret is that I’m always angry.  That’s hardly an ideal state, especially at a crisis point. I needed a healthier emotion.

Gratitude was my first thought, as I’m deeply thankful to my loved ones for their boundless kindness and patience, even on my most Green days. Yet gratitude isn’t enough to balance a life on. I realized that my greatest motivators are seemingly small things: my husband’s smile, our cat curled on the sofa, hugs from nieces and nephews, sunlight shining through spring leaves—the list is, thankfully, endless. Though many of these moments are seeped in gratitude and love, above all they are moments of joy. Small pebbles that, piled up, form a bulwark against my worst enemy—myself, not dealing.

I created this project using only materials already on hand. The cards were printed on leftover Legion Bamboo cover stock. It was nice to get a chance to break out my Kabel and Tangent type (the Tangent comes from New York foundry Morgans and Wilcox, for those typography geeks out there). Each card was hand-brayered using a blend of Hanco inks.  The accompanying text was printed on the backs of leftover broadsides from a poetry reading I participated in at the Center for Book Arts. “Desolate” first appeared in Noble/Gas Quarterly, and repurposing it here felt especially fitting.

Joy isn’t just about what we receive; it’s also about what we give and share. It brought me great joy to create these cards, and I hope they can bring a bit of happiness to someone else.

P.S.: Here is the entire poem from the broadside, for those interested:

Desolate

The road ribbons through barren fields of 
windswept bushes and leafless trees we can
no longer see. I open the window – the desert
air is cold without the sun – and taste the
amber scent of burning mesquite. Black sky
turns blue. Color seeps into the land. There
are no boundaries here in border country
nothing to catch the roses and pinks, the lilacs
and gilded golds. Winter-bright hues of spring
flowers and dyed eggs nestled within neon green
plastic grass. I take one, yellow as the noon
sun, roll it under my palm. The shell shatters
beneath my hand. Prying back a shard of color
I am confronted by smooth white blankness
like the crackled glaze of a porcelain vase whose
patina of lines signal not flaws but perfection
Whether I am cracked or craquelure depends
on the day. The pain within me burns red
feeding the fire of its own malignancy. Pick at
my scarred shell: darkness weeps out, staining
the horizon like a bruise that never ends. The
desert is cold when there is no sun.