Episode 176: From Scotland with Wisdom: Joy Clarkson and the Art of Nurturing Life

Welcome to From Scotland with Wisdom, where we embark on a captivating journey with the insightful Joy Clarkson, from the enchanting landscapes of Scotland. In this episode, we delve into her latest book, "You Are a Tree" as Joy generously shares her profound perspectives on metaphors and the art of nurturing life, thought, and prayer. Joy is an author and host of the popular podcast, Speaking with Joy. Joy completed her PhD in theology at the University of St Andrews, where she researched how art can be a resource of hope and consolation. I hope you will join us today as she shares her insight. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to Gracefield Grit. I'm your host, lana Stinner, and we are chatting all about growing your faith, family and the backyard farm. Here at the Gracefield Homestead, we are having honest, hard and authentic conversations with some amazing guests about getting back to the basics and what's important in life. We are not for everyone and we don't clean up our conversations, so you will get the unedited chat Each episode. You can expect practical tips and encouragement. I am so honored to have you join us today, so grab a cup of coffee and let's do this thing. Hey friends, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Today we are chatting with Joy Clarkson. She is an author and host of the popular podcast. Speaking with Joy, she is the books editor for Plough Quarterly and a research associate in theology and literature at King's College London. Joy completed her PhD in theology at the University of St Andrews, where she researched how art can be a resource of hope. Joy loves daffodils, birdwatching and a well-brewed cup of tea, just like we do. Welcome, joy. I'm so glad to have you join us on the podcast today. I'm so excited to be here. I would love for our friends here online to get to know you a little bit better. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your life growing up, what it is that drew you in to be a writer, a poet and a deep thinker. I love your approach. I've looked through your book and read it and I just love your approach to life and I want our friends here to know a little bit more about you before we dive in.

Speaker 2: 1:46

That's a great question. I think a lot of it has to boil down to my family and the world that I grew up in. Both of my parents are authors. I think in some sense I had the idea that you could be an author. That was the thing that you could too. My mom will always joke that some families they're all farmers or they're all doctors and that's the family trade. In a way, that was our family trade. I think it wasn't just that, it was also that I grew up in a very literary, verbal household. I haven't actually talked about this in any other podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:22

I've been on. So there you go. I was homeschooled and my parents took a whole book Charlotte Mason so the main way that I was educated was through reading a ton of books and then talking about them. When I think about the course that my life has taken on some level even now as I'm teaching master students, I am still reading a bunch of books and talking about them I was drawn to the life of words and the ways in which it feels important, I think, for human beings to be able to talk about things that are important to us, and to talk about them clearly and well.

Speaker 2: 3:03

Sometimes the best way to talk about things clearly and well is through stories. Sometimes we can't actually get at things through literal language, and that's how I ended up studying the arts and theology, because I thought, well, the most important thing to talk about is God. To me, that felt like the most important thing, but I always found for me that it was easier or more possible to talk and think about deep and mysterious things when I was talking and thinking about it through images and stories and music. That felt like that kind of encompassed some of the mystery. So, yeah, so I think that's painting with broad brushstrokes part of what kind of led me to where I am and led me to love doing what I do.

Speaker 1: 3:50

I love that I love that and that you're homeschooled. I think I missed that. I didn't realize that you were homeschooled, and so we have a lot of homeschoolers here in our listening base and I would love for you to you know. Are you a fan of homeschooling, being that you were brought up in that, or do you? You know? What was your experience with that? Did you enjoy that?

Speaker 2: 4:13

I did. Yeah, it's funny, it's not something I have a reason really to talk about. A lot in my normal life, you know, people don't tend to ask you when you're their instructor in college. Were you homeschooled, right? Right, but no, I think homeschooling was really good for me. I think something that it allowed was for my parents to kind of allow us to excel in what we excelled in and meet us where we were with the things that we struggled with, and I think that it also sometimes for worse, but mostly for better gave me almost like a kind of.

Speaker 2: 4:48

I had a lot of formative years where I wasn't as formed by kind of peer pressure or thinking about how the people thought about me, and I actually think there is some benefit in life to caring people think about you. You do need that. As you know, we live in a society, as they say. But I also think that that early formation of kind of allowing a lot of those seeds of creativity to just blossom without self-consciousness was really helpful for me. And you know, I think every child, every family is different, but that it was, and I did a mix of things, you know, when I was in high school I did some school, but it was a really good experience for me and I think it was really formative in ways that I don't usually talk about.

Speaker 1: 5:35

I love that and I totally agree with the creativity piece. I think that is one of the huge benefits that we don't often talk about that with the people that I know that, schooled at home, their creativity level just seemed so. Maybe that's something you know. I've never really thought about it, but I wonder if our standard public school system is just stifling a little bit to that. And then you throw in a art class here there, a music class here and there in high school, but it doesn't just truly get at your soul in your heart.

Speaker 1: 6:09

So that's interesting I love that fact about you. Okay, so totally off topic, but you had, before we started recording and we are chatting, you had mentioned you were in, you lived in Scotland and that you work in London. So I knew the London piece was not informed about the Scotland piece. So I am fascinated. I've been there long, long ago. So tell us just a day in your life, from when you wake up, what is? What is a day like?

Speaker 2: 6:39

there. So the background to why I live in Scotland is that I didn't. I did my PhD at St Andrews University or University of St Andrews, which one goes first, and so I've ended up back here, even though I work in London. So my typical day depends on whether it's a London day or a Scotland day, but in Scotland, so I work in London when I'm teaching. I'm down there once a week and that is. You know, that's a busy day. That's getting up and hopping on the tube and getting a coffee before I go to teach students and then meeting with students, and then you know the kind of city life which I really enjoy, but I also love that. Then my main kind of life, I go back to my little fishing village and an average day is because my office is in London. I do a lot of work from home, so I wake up and I'm a real breakfast girl. I think that it's important to eat breakfast.

Speaker 2: 7:33

So, I eat my breakfast and I usually try to do work at a coffee shop in the morning. There's not many options, but I'm very faithful to the coffee shop that I do have. Oh, I love it and I do some work. I always try to do writing in the morning and then have lunch with my loved one, and then I do work in the afternoon. That sounds very boring, but then I'll add in a walk. Right now it's too cold to walk in Scotland. It's just kind of miserable. Usually I would take a walk We'd live not too far from sea and then maybe go to a pub with some friends after dinner, which is one of the great benefits of the UK that you know, the pubs are Not a bar it feels very familial.

Speaker 2: 8:12

You'll see kids and dogs and stuff. That's the thing I love.

Speaker 1: 8:16

It sounds dreamy. It sounds dreamy. That is on my recent bucket list to make it back there, so thank you for sharing that with us. Okay, so you often share about your love for the outdoors, flowers and birds. We are on the tipping point of spring here in the Midwest in the United States and just this very weekend I noticed our Daffodil stems are finally popping up and there are some buds on our trees. You write about watching the cherry tree outside your bedroom window. Share a little bit about that and what it taught you.

Speaker 2: 8:51

So that section in my book you Are a Tree was about after I had just finished my studies and I was really kind of burned out and exhausted and I moved from Scotland and I was living in England and I had this cherry tree that was outside my window and I moved there in winter and it was totally kind of barren and stripped down and over the course of the year that I lived in that one house I watched it go from that kind of barren winter tree to suddenly getting the buds and then bursting into these. Like I always say this, they genuinely were like glow in the dark, like at night. I felt like I could see them glowing in the dark beautiful, you know papery petals in the springtime and then just being absolutely bursting with foliage in the summer and then kind of that gentle transition back to the bareness in the winter. And as I watched that tree I watched something go through these really radical changes, you know, four times in one year. But it made me think about how each one of those stages, each one of those seasons, was a part of the next, that you couldn't have the springtime if you didn't have the winter, you couldn't have the summer if you didn't let the petals fall off in the spring and that each of them was meaningful and important.

Speaker 2: 10:08

And I thought about myself and I thought maybe I actually am more like a cherry tree. You know, there will be seasons and there have been seasons in my life where I just felt kind of barren and like I didn't have any leaves or pretty petals and then it didn't seem like anything was happening. And but understanding those in the context of the cherry tree, thinking about my seasons are gonna be different. I'm gonna be capable of different things in different seasons. Some seasons will feel fruitful and abundant and some will feel exhausting. Some will feel more contemplative and some will feel more active and kind of embracing that lesson from the cherry tree to not feel guilty about the season that I'm in.

Speaker 2: 10:48

If I'm in winter, nothing that I do can make it be spring. I just have to wait and let those roots grow deep. And actually for cherry trees, I've been told that it's actually the really cold winter is important for the fruit in the summer. So kind of embracing that maybe there's actually something about this winter that will help me bear fruit in the future, you know. Or if I'm in a busy summer season where I need to start to harvest and I feel like I'm not thinking deep thoughts or praying enough. Going you know what, maybe that's just the season that I'm in, and so watching the cherry tree kind of invited me to pay more attention to my own life and to think about what season I was in and to act accordingly and not live under the kind of guilty exhaustion of thinking that I needed to be the same all the time.

Speaker 1: 11:35

That's so good and so true about how, in winter, you know we're just coming out of winter and there's so much going on. You know behind the scenes are in. You know we have a bunch of raised beds under the ground, that's going on and it just looks barren and cold and desolate, but there's a lot of activity going on during that timeframe. So I thank you for sharing that, because that's such a powerful word picture to me. So tell us a little bit more about your faith journey. Was there any pivotal moments in your life that you feel like led you to hear or that you had a huge aha moment? Of course, you know our entire faith journey is a big aha moment. Every day, every minute.

Speaker 1: 12:25

It feels like you know, you think at my age you think, okay, I've read the Bible through you so many times, I know it all, whatever, and it's like literally every day is an aha moment. But is there something that was pivotal you know during your lifetime that you can look back on and say that that led you to where you're at?

Speaker 2: 12:47

That's a good question. So there are. There are there's actually kind of two moments that came to my mind and I'll try to tell you about both briefly, and I actually have written about both of them in one of my other books. But I, you know, as I shared, I was raised in a really loving family where faith was very exciting and good and I had a lot of scripture read to me as a kid, and.

Speaker 2: 13:12

But something I really struggled with through my kind of late teens and early 20s, and that I still struggle with from time to time, is I just kind of would have this kind of existential doubt that I could trust that Christianity was true, but and that's that's almost a not quite incorrect, that's not quite a correct way to say it, but I would just have this sense that I deeply wanted it to be true.

Speaker 2: 13:35

But I had all these questions and doubts and I just wasn't sure if I kind of generate belief in myself, and so I had, I really struggled with that. And I struggled with it because I often felt like that was narrated by people around me as like a desire to rebel or something, and for me it really wasn't. It was I deeply wanted to believe. But I found it really difficult to do so and I had this one kind of miraculous moment where I had been really struggling with that and it had been kind of brought on because someone, someone who was beloved as somebody that I loved that's a convoluted way of saying that I had died and it felt just kind of earth-shattering and difficult and sad and it's I had been feeling pretty good in my faith and it just kind of spun me out into a place that I kind of couldn't hold and didn't feel like I was capable of holding onto my faith.

Speaker 2: 14:28

And I happened to be going on a weekend trip this is actually in Scotland with a friend and and I was like trying not to tell her all my deep existential doubts that I was having as you know, we all occasionally will do and but we were staying in this tower. This sounds like I'm making it up, but her family had been Scottish back like back generations, and her mom had found that they had like an ancestral tower, and by that I mean like it's not like a castle, it's like literally like a tall tower and there's just like four, four stories and they're all one room. And they had these in back in the day because the lower, like the lowlands of Scotland, were really dangerous because they were always people were fighting, so they would have a tower for someone to like watch and see if the surrounding clans were, you know, moving for attack. So apparently this has been traded to an Airbnb and so we were staying there and I kind of managed to hold it together.

Speaker 2: 15:21

We had a nice day and then I, but I couldn't sleep, so I went down and I made myself a cup of tea and I was kind of journaling about you know, kind of you know existential like is this, it, like it, can I? You know, is that? Do I have a faith anymore? And my computer was playing Spotify. You know Spotify will like just choose something for your algorithm and it started playing this beautiful song. If you've never heard it, look it up. Called you've heard the song Jesus blood never failed me yet. Have you heard that song? I think so. I think so. Okay, so it has a really interesting story, which is that we don't actually know where it came from. It's not actually him, but in this documentary on sorry, I'm getting you.

Speaker 1: 16:02

But it sounds like. It sounds like a him, right? Is it the okay? Yes, yeah, yes.

Speaker 2: 16:07

But it's. They found this in this documentary on homelessness in London. This guy found this, this man, this homeless man who was singing it to himself over and over again. And then this composer made this beautiful kind of orchestral arrangement around this very simple song, and so, apparently, spotify thought that that was something that I would want to hear, and so it started playing this and it was beautiful, and it was over and over again, and I was like, of all the songs you know, it would bring me this that Jesus blood never failed me yet.

Speaker 2: 16:37

And then, out of nowhere, a butterfly I'm not kidding showed up in this tower, this tower in the third story. Like where did a butterfly come from? And it was this funny moment because I it just felt like God had met me. And then he said you know you, you actually don't have to generate the faith within yourself. I am with you. If you let go, I will still be there, and that's it was also kind of interesting moment because it didn't prove anything.

Speaker 2: 17:08

It didn't like, you know, I'm sure somehow I could imagine a circumstance in which a butterfly could end up in a third story of a tower and and you know, spotify would choose a song, but to me it met me in that moment and kind of reminded me of the sense that I don't have to carry my own faith. So I think that's something that's very important to me is is the sense that I I try not to focus so much on my own belief in God, but the sense that God is there to be believed in, whether I believe him or not, and he actually, in the words of Wendell Berry, he holds me even when I don't want him. Oh, that's powerful. You got, I've got goosebumps.

Speaker 1: 17:47

That's good, that is so good. Oh, wow, and I have that picture in my head. Just you know what a beautiful scene that he showed up there for you. Love that, I love that. Okay, so in your latest book, titled you are a tree and other metaphors to nourish your life, thought and prayer, your chapter one starts with Jeremiah 17.8, which is one of my favorite books. Your chapter one starts with Jeremiah 17.8, which is one of my absolute favorite passages in scripture. I'll go ahead and read it just so our listeners remember which one it is. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes, its leaves are always green, it has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. I love that. So what is the practical message and takeaway from your writings as you begin your book? What do you want our listeners to think about?

Speaker 2: 18:44

So one of the things I want to think about I think we already started to get at this when I was talking about my cherry tree but so I want people to think about the metaphors they use to describe their life and I know that sounds very like I don't use metaphors. You know why are metaphors important to me? But something that I think they actually are very important. So you have people like there's a book called Metaphors we Live by. We're talking about the fact that all of our language is metaphorical and that the language that we use shapes kind of our expectations and then how we act. So an example of this I talk about in the book it's like if you always use metaphors of sickness for love which sounds funny, right, you think we don't use sickness for love, but you do. You talk about being crazy in love, you talk about being lovesick. If that is your main way of talking about love, then love is. That means that you expect that love is something that happens to you. It kind of takes you over and takes you out of your normal state. It's something you can catch, feelings, and then it's gone right, just like a disease passes. And that metaphor shapes how we think about how we engage with love, whereas if you replace it with something different like love is a home you know, we talk about letting someone in, feeling at home, with someone belonging then that metaphor is more capacious because you can think about a home is something that is safe, so you don't let dangerous things into it. It's a place that you experience belonging, it's a place that you accept the limitations of, but then you can make it interesting and relevant to your own personality. So that's an example of the fact that we do use metaphors all the time, and the metaphors that we use shape how we kind of act in life.

Speaker 2: 20:30

And so with the URA Tree, that particular metaphor and the metaphor for the whole book, part of what I wanted to respond to and I think this is a practical thing, even if it feels a little bit out there is how often we talk about our lives in terms of kind of machines. So we talk about recharging, we talk about updating each other like we're software, we talk about processing something. You know, when something difficult happens, it's really processing that. And the problem to me with all these metaphors they do describe something right and we just talk that way naturally all the time. And it makes sense that we do, because metaphors are using physical, material things to describe kind of immaterial things, right, and we use machine metaphors because we see machines all the time. We are talking through machine, you know.

Speaker 2: 21:21

But the problem with that is that if you think about metaphors as shaping our expectations, if I talk about myself like a machine, if I talk about processing, then what I expect is that my emotions will act like a computer processing something, right? So when a computer processes something, when it processes podcasts, and you update it, it takes some time and then it's done, you update it. The problem is that's not usually how our emotions work, right, I'll have something difficult happen to me. I'll think I'm over it and two months later I'll be mad or sad or whatever again. And if I have that kind of machine metaphor in my mind, I'll feel frustrated and I'll think why is this still happening, why is this happening to me again? And I'll feel guilty and I'll feel shame and I'll get stuck in that cycle because I'm expecting myself to act like a machine. But I'm not a machine.

Speaker 2: 22:13

And that also goes, I think, with productivity. You know, when you beat yourself up because my computer does act the same way every day, and I want it to act the same way every day, I want it to run the same speed, I want it to be able to do the same things. But we can't right. I today I found myself kind of exhausted because yesterday was my launch day. I had a lot of adrenaline going all day, so most of what I managed to do today was like answer emails and have this conversation with you, and if I were to think about myself like a machine, I would go.

Speaker 2: 22:42

The computer that is Joy Marie Clarkson, is malfunctioning. She is not acting, she's not producing the same amount of things. But that's not how our bodies work. We are more like the cherry tree and we actually we exist better, we're more productive, we're more fruitful, we're happier when we accept kind of what we are like. And so I think watching out for those metaphors that we use and replacing them sometimes with more life-giving metaphors helps us do that. So that's a very long way to say. I think that metaphors are practical. Thinking about them shapes how we live and the expectations that we have of ourselves, and so I want the book to kind of help people be aware of the metaphors they're using and then give them other metaphors that might be more nourishing or life-giving or organic as opposed to mechanistic.

Speaker 1: 23:31

And that's so good, and we oh, as you gave the example of I need to recharge or I need to. You know we had recently we had the shooting here in Kansas City and I said several times it's days later I'm still processing it, it doesn't seem real, and so we say those things on how we are using our emotions, and there there's definitely better ways to do that. So I've caught myself doing that a lot in the last couple of weeks. So you've also written about being a potted plant. So you had said that you had moved a lot as a child and then even as an adult, you had moved once a year for seven years and you never felt like you put down true roots. So do you still feel like you're a potted plant?

Speaker 2: 24:20

In some ways yes and in some ways no. So I think that part of why I wrote that section of the book was that having that kind of metaphor come to me. And the context of that was I was sitting in my old flat where I finished my studies and I was sitting, all my stuff was all ramble-shamble inside and I was looking at the little garden that it shared with the letting agency below and I had all these beautiful trees and they'd been there for a long time before I came there and they'll probably be there a long time after. And then I was thinking on my little potted plant inside that I kind of kept alive while I was finishing my studies and I was trying to decide what to do with it, whether I should give it to somebody else, and but it was kind of getting a little stringy. So I thought that might be almost rude and I thought I'm a potted plant.

Speaker 2: 25:08

I am not like these beautiful rooted trees.

Speaker 2: 25:11

I am always going from one place to another and, like my little plant inside, I've grown too much to fit in my pot and where can I belong, and I think actually just being able to put that into words was really helpful for me Sometimes there's just relief in being able to describe an experience that you're having, but I think it also helped me to think about okay, well, if I am too big for my pot, then what do I need?

Speaker 2: 25:39

How can I grow, how can I deepen? And I would say that in the basically three years since I had that experience and wrote those words, there are many ways in my life where maybe I haven't rooted to one place I would love to eventually. But there are places, there are ways in my life in which I am more rooted in community, in relationships and in my faith that I feel like I have put down some roots, even if they're not in community. But part of that was putting that finger, my finger, on the fact that, okay, if I'm going to continue to grow, I need to not be a pot of plants anymore. And so I think that has been kind of a characteristic of the last few years for me is kind of narrowing my life and going. I'm going to choose, I'm going to narrow my options and find places to plant relationally, spiritually and emotionally.

Speaker 1: 26:31

That's so good and it's so hard in life when we're being transplanted. I mean, we're here, we're right in the middle of all of that, getting ready to go into spring, and I, just as you're chatting, I'm just I'm thinking about our blueberries and we are here at the Gracefield Homestead. We're kind of we focus in on a few plants and we do them really well and we grow a lot of them and I'm not into a bunch of different things, but we try a lot and then if it works and we can go on and blueberries are one of the things we have. Just it's been an epic fail over here. To be honest with you, every year I try to plant blueberries and I don't know if it's our region or my soil or what I'm doing wrong, but we've been busy with other things and so I haven't spent the research time to like what am I doing.

Speaker 1: 27:21

I just throw something in the ground or whatever, and I buy a potted plant already from the nursery and put it in the ground and like, literally three times in, three times in the last three years, we've lost them and so we've started digging in. I'm like, okay, this is our year to be very successful at this one plant. We mastered the potatoes, we mastered the peppers, we mastered the tomatoes all these things, we've mastered this. I'm going to conquer blueberries, and so the year of the blueberry, the year of the blueberry and so interesting.

Speaker 1: 27:53

As you're chatting, we've been watching a lot of YouTube videos and like, what have we done wrong? What do we need to change this year? But one of them showed this guy taking the big pot out and he literally cut up with a chainsaw up the middle in a cross on both sides, like it almost went all the way through the plant. And I was just like horrified watching this video, like you're going to cut the whole plant and I, you know, we've always broken the roots apart and you know it's so it just is not what you think you need to do when you have to break up that bunch of roots, but it's so painful to do that.

Speaker 1: 28:32

But and then he's flash forwarding and showing these, you know, beautiful, abundant plants, after this huge, painful you know like we are used to that with the pruning on, you know, on the tops of the trees and things. But he's doing this at the root level and I was like, wow, that's such a beautiful picture and you're talking about. It's not always easy when we're, you know, trying to transplant and put those roots down. It can be so painful.

Speaker 2: 28:59

So yeah, well, that's something. I love hearing that and it's something I wrote a little bit about the book. But I love Wendell Berry as a novelist. You know, great inspirer of many people to go and have a piece of land. But I used to always think but he has an ancestral farm, like I have to pick somewhere. I'm the blueberry plant that has to pick somewhere and rip up my roots.

Speaker 1: 29:21

Yes.

Speaker 2: 29:22

And and I think that that's such a reminder that I think that being rooted somewhere is not really easy, you know it's. It's especially if you've had a long nomadic life, and I think that to some degree most people in the modern world have had a pretty nomadic life. It's, it is just kind of the conditions of the world that we're in and I think I am really grateful for the some of the rootedness I do have in my life now. But it can feel violent, like when you, when you, when you choose somewhere or you choose someone, or you choose some church, where you choose one job, there's something, there's something very scary about that right, because it's it's going I'm choosing this place and not another, this person and not another, and it can do a lot of violence to how you think about who you are and some of your expectations of life. But but that there's such grace and growth in in that experience which can feel, could feel very uprooting.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Yes.

Speaker 2: 30:24

Even as you are being rooted, and that's that's that. Yeah, I wrote a little bit about that kind of experience and one of the other chapters I talked about I think the chapter is entitled creativity as birth, but it's also kind of about vocation, the things you're called to in life. You know, whether that means the job that you're called to or which I don't think anyone's really called to a job, but the sense of kind of what you're called to in life, or marriage and things like that, that all of those things kind of involve something like birth right, that you kind of you go from one state to another, you become something new, and that that is that birth is always risky business and planting.

Speaker 2: 31:02

It's painful, yes, it is painful, and planting, planting potted plants is always risky business, but but I think and I think this is kind of a part of what I would diagnose as some of the problems of our culture it is risky business, it is painful, but you can only grow so much in a pot and at some point you will begin to not flourish, and so so I'm thankful for the, the terror and the goodness of starting to put down roots in life.

Speaker 1: 31:33

That's so good. So, good, you started chapter six of your new book with another one of my favorite passages in scripture, psalm 55, 22, and it is. I'll read it here give your burdens to the Lord and he will take care of you. He will not permit the godly to slip and fall. And you write about burdens of grief, depression, sadness, disappointment and shame. Share a little bit more about this. And what would you say to a listener that is beyond burdens and just can't see the light right now?

Speaker 2: 32:13

Well, I think the first thing I would just say before I ramble is that you are not alone. Other people have felt this way. God is with you, you are remembered, you are held, you are loved and Okay, talk, and to try not to feel guilty for feeling where you are, because it will only add more burdens to you. So in that chapter I wrote about how so many of the words that we use for kind of burdens or sadness or depression have to do with weight, right, so we talk about I feel burdened. Or we talk about feeling heavy-hearted, right, like that's like a weight in your heart. Or even the word depression implies pushing something down, right, putting weight on something so that it goes further down. And in the opposite of that's true too, like when we talk about happy personally, say they're light-hearted, or you know, humor brings levity. So that sense of weightiness and in the chapter I talk about the difference between heaviness and a burden, and that may seem kind of pedantic, but if sadness is heavy, that's what kind of depression feels like to me, right, it's like carrying around an extra weight with you, no matter what you're doing, so that doing normal tasks and being a normal person is more exhausting. But for me sometimes this may seem silly, but visualizing my sadness or my struggles when I've been in that place, not as heaviness but as a burden, like a literal burden, like a little backpack of all of my sadness that I have to carry around, kind of weirdly, helps me strategize how to be and how to exist with sadness. Because, for one thing, you can think, okay, well, if my sadness is a burden, if it's a little backpack full of weight, is there some of this weight that I can get rid of? Right, some things in life we just we are going to carry burdens, right, if we love people, if we have lived in this world full of chaos and destruction, we will carry burdens in our life and some of those things we can't put down, but some of them we can. So if you're carrying a lot of shame that is not your shame to carry, then talk with somebody, find a way to kind of take that out of your burden. Right, you will have to carry burdens. You don't have to carry all burdens. It also helps me think about okay, well, if my burdens are a burden of their backpack, then I can set them down sometimes, right, I think if anyone's been sad. Sometimes you can have a day where you just almost forgot that you were sad. You know and maybe that's as simple as watching a TV show you like, or there's a particular person that brings you happiness Find a way to set down your burden every once in a while and I also I was thinking about this recently.

Speaker 2: 35:01

How many of the words we use it's like we say that crying brings a release. That's like putting down your burden right, to release. It's just for a little while, to set down your burden. But the other thing about burdens is that we can carry them with other people. So I talk in that chapter about Galatians. But it talks about.

Speaker 2: 35:20

It says bear each other's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Right, and I think it's funny. It's kind of a debated passage among scholars. Scholars can debate anything, because Paul uses this phrase once that he never seems to use it again the fulfill the law of Christ. But I think the idea behind it is that Christ bears our burdens, right, he bears the burden of sin and he also carries all of our tears in a bottle. And so the idea is basically Christ is for us, for you, so do it for other people, that when we get to bear the burdens of other people, we are getting to participate in what Christ does for us.

Speaker 2: 35:59

And it's also interesting because there's this play on words, because a little before it says each of you bear your own burden, and then it says bear each other's burdens. And that seems kind of contradictory. But the difference is that the first burden is like your work bag for the day. It's a burden you can carry. The word just means like your daily burden, whereas when it says bear each other's burdens, that burden is like a folder, it's like something that you cannot carry on your own. And so it's saying bear each other's things that we can't bear on our own.

Speaker 2: 36:33

And I think that for me often and maybe this is what I would speak to somebody who's listening to this I think that a big burden that we can carry is not wanting to burden others, so saying I'm depressed, I'm sad, but I'm depressed and sad for stupid reasons and I don't want to make other people carry this and I'm so difficult and I'm so whatever. And then we just keep it all inside and keep on carrying our super heavy backpacks. And what I would say to you is, if that's you, you may be preventing someone from fulfilling the law of Christ. You may be preventing someone from getting to have the joy of getting to be like Jesus, and I don't want to promise too much. People are imperfect. People don't know how to deal with sadness. It scares them. But if there's someone in your life who you know does want to help you, let them help you, let them fulfill the law of Christ. That is actually a gift that you can give other people. So those are some of my thoughts.

Speaker 1: 37:32

And that's so good, and we so often try to be independent and we don't want other people's help, and now we're in this world where we're not tight in community, where our neighbor is, you know, a few feet away from us and we're borrowing sugar and eggs from them. We're in this independent society where we can call Uber Eats or whatever it is that you need and it can be on your doorstep in an hour, and so I love that you shared that, because we do need to allow people to help us as well, because it gives a gift to them as well. So thank you for coming on today. This has been just really inspirational and thoughtful and I'm so glad you came on. Your book is called you Are a Tree and Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, thought and Prayer. Where can our friends find your book? Where can they find you online if they want to follow you?

Speaker 2: 38:28

You can find my book anywhere books are sold, so all the usual suspects Amazon, barnes, noble bookshoporg and I would love for you to purchase copy. And then you can find me on social media. I'm on Instagram, facebook and Twitter under Join Marie Clarkson. Usually my handle is Join Us the Brave, and then you can also find me. I have kind of the center of where I do all of my writing and podcasting is through Substack. So if you just look up Joy Clarkson, if you just Google Joy Clarkson, Substack, it will come up, and I think if you type in JoyClarxsoncom, it will also direct it to Substack. So that's where you can find me and I would love to connect with people. I do a weekly newsletter and at the moment I'm doing weekly podcast too, so I would love to connect to other people further.

Speaker 1: 39:18

All right, well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a joy, joy. Well, thank you so much for having me, we enjoyed having you here, so all right, thank you.

Speaker 2: 39:27

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 39:28

Thank you for joining us today in this episode of Gracefield Grit. I know that your time is valuable and I truly appreciate you being here. I hope it was helpful and that you'll share it with a friend. In order to schedule amazing guests on our show, we could use some good reviews. So if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd be honored if you could head over to the podcast app on your phone, tap the album art for the Gracefield Grit podcast, scroll down to the bottom of the page and write a review. I'm looking forward to our next episode and I hope you'll join us again. Blessings to you today, friend, as you live out your own Gracefield Grit.