With Joy, Carry the Water

Finding blessings in the mundane and messy (and in Britney Spears)

Many evenings, I just don’t have it in me to dance with my little daughter. The only light visible to me is the flickering that happens when all the task boxes have been checked: cooking, eating, washing dishes, emails. So she dances on her own, dresses her dolls or draws figures. 

Then, there are those sometimes moments when the baked linguine emerges from the oven, bubbling happily, heralding new life.  

Look at this!, I nod to the linguine. 

Look at this!, she nods to her drawing, pencil stick figures of her and me with a big heart next to us. 

Beautiful! I announce.

Wow, smells yummy, Dad, she says, standing on her tiptoes peering into the casserole dish.

I pull out a cheesy noodle and place it on the counter in front of her.

She pulls out a pencil and asks if the word “love” has an “e” in it.

Only if you want it to, love, I say to her. 

She blows on the noodle, then eats it. Wow!, she says with mouth full, then adds the letter “e.” 

Here, Dad. She gives me the drawing…and steals another cheesy noodle, giggling. 

She put “love” in the heart. 

The flickering light grows. Subscribe

I feel a shift and this time I listen to it. 

I have a sense of being the meeting point, itself, between the giving and the receiving, the instant of exchange in the great bucket brigade of life. The dance is here, now, and I feel compelled to give what is given. You know the feeling?

My daughter skips to the next room, planning her next drawing. It will take thirty seconds for me to cue up Hit Me Baby One More Time. For my daughter, the Britney Spears bucket is an ocean.  

The prophet Isaiah beseeched his people to carry the waters of salvation to all with joy. He came to this realization after confronting his fear of God and finding that on the other side of that fear is what saves, like water to parched lips. So, doing what prophets do, he tells the people to get to it, to bring the water to the un-quenched…with joy. 

AND…he doesn’t tell people how to do it. 

Because, hey, how you do it, I do it, or my small-but-mighty daughter does it will be different. Your bucket, in its unique beauty, will transform to something else when you hand it to me, for it will then be colored anew with my meanings and narratives and felt sensations and personalized points of connection to the divine.

But it, too, will forever contain elements of all the buckets that came before. When I hand the bucket to my daughter, I’m not just handing my bucket to her. I’m handing yours, too. And you will hand my bucket to those in your path. 

The gift to us at midlife, is that we are perfectly positioned to conduct this divine exchange through the mundane, messy daily-ness of living. The buckets are everywhere for us! Kids, jobs, cooking, cleaning, play dates, lockdowns, home maintenance, and so on.

Look closely: the happy, bubbling linguine is everywhere. I’m convinced: this discovery is joy.

Experiment with the possibility that joy, itself, isn’t manufactured within us; it isn’t something we birth from effort. It is the great chain of being, the bucket brigade, itself. Not merely the waters of life but the act of participating in the giving and receiving of the buckets. 

Ten seconds to go…

Five seconds…

Two seconds…

BUM bum BUM bum…Oh baby, baby…BUM bum BUM bum…O baby, baby…How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right…BUM bum BUM bum…

Tiny arm rises overhead, tiny fist clenches pencil.

Hold high the lanterns, friends.