Joy, a Shiver
Joy, a Shiver
Hannah Hinsch
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea –
— Emily Dickinson
I sit in my car. Beyond the vacant beach house that I idle in front of, the Puget Sound spills like ink onto sand. Sea lions weave their bodies through the glass of dark water and I hear it clear as winter birdsong breaking over my head—joy, a new sound.
Rain that will soon turn to snow hums against my windows. Up the hill, at the neighbor’s house, lights are strung up in a tree—no mourning doves, but blue-lit streaks run down each branch.
*
This winter, I started writing poetry with youth as part of a non-profit organization based in Seattle. Volunteers are trained as poetry mentors—a unique role that is neither therapist or teacher, but simply a facilitator of poetry writing. We sat down to write with 12- and 13-year-old girls labeled “at-risk” due to their behaviors, which were really signs of their distress that craved expression and release.
In Writing With At-Risk Youth, Richard Gold explains that “sometimes the fragmented pieces of traumatized youth are like shy, transmuting birds that change and fly away as we approach.”
Racial trauma, and countless other traumas that the youth we work with experience, are things I will never know. I must only be strong enough to care. To sit beside them and honor their work as it unfolds in their time, in their words.
While we cannot all possibly share in particular traumas, I believe there are particular birds within each of us: parts of us that have been changed by what has happened to us. Transmuting birds that fly away as we approach.
*
Each Tuesday, I walk through the middle school parking lot. Through open windows in winter, I hear the school band tuning their instruments, tubas and wheezing clarinets their own watery music. We write in a portable, a classroom with black plastic chairs and air so cold as to send a shiver.
Paul identifies the Spirit with the Greek parakletos, counselor and advocate, related to the verb parakleo—“to call alongside”.
My own counselor once spoke over me: The Spirit gives us strength to keep going. The burden will be lighter.
A chemical fight or flight response, anxiety is one of the most common mental health conditions in the United States, so I am not alone when I say that it has caused many sleepless nights, painful self-doubt and a pounding heart run through with fear.
And it has also brought me here.
I wanted to write with youth because I saw writing work in me. I began to write during a difficult recovery from alcoholism, when I not only had to feel the anxiety I had covered up for years, but a time in which I was also severely ill, my asthmatic lungs wounded by alcohol abuse. And slowly—even amid breathless nights when I wanted to unfold my ribcage like an accordion—I recognized God transforming me, slow and lovely as health. I wrote to Him in poems about swallows, moonlit lilies, cool air: for the first time, I recognized His Spirit in me, reflecting back.
Even amid drowning pleural terrain, I felt Him come alongside me in the depths of my humanity and touch me there, a scarred palm pressed against my chest to send water through the wound. With Him beside me, I’ve realized I can stand in my anxiety like a cold river. A river where pain flows into joy.
*
Earlier this spring, to prepare to work with the youth, I attended a virtual training workshop. Presiding over the group was Dr. E, a poet and psychologist who specializes in spoken word.
During the training, Dr. E asked someone to perform a poem they had just written; we’d just practiced what’s called “taking dictation” in pairs, in which each played the role of either mentor or poet. The poet dictates, the mentor simply writes down what they say the moment it’s spoken. Word becomes fluid as thought.
At the urging of my training partner, I volunteered.
It's like a bird is in my chest
the bird wants to fly and that is a good thing
sometimes birds are trapped and want to be free
Dr. E paused and told me to take a breath. Even miles away over a blue-lit screen, he sensed my nervousness. After a pause, he noticed where I’d lingered or where my breath had caught, where my voice had changed. He asked how I had come to these lines.
I told him I’d started with the ever-present wingbeat in my chest. Thoughts racing, I told him I’d remembered Emily Dickinson’s: hope is the thing with feathers.
His smile spread . “When you think about this line from Dickinson, how does that hope feel?”
“Warm,” I said, after a moment.
“Where do you feel that warmth in your body?” Dr. E continued. The skin by his brown eyes crinkled at the crow’s feet.
“I feel it...here,” I pressed my hand against the center of my chest, where rib and bone form the line of my sternum.
“The same place the anxious bird is,” he said.
Realization thundered quietly between us. More, I felt a strange joy deep in my bones at the realization that my anxiety was part of me, a place warm with hope, a heart held in me that, indeed, transmutes and flies as He approaches.
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
Poetry has a natural movement toward revelation. A joyous turn. In that moment of joy, I was turning toward my anxiousness rather than flying away from it, and that turn to the most painful part of me was a turn toward God.
This continual turn is a realization unfolding in joy, wing over wing.
*
During my training sessions, I learned about creative joy, but I did not feel it until I wrote with a sister (as we call them) who opened herself completely to writing—she wrote about a beach, about dolphins and dark water, about her depression as a girl with cold fingers, about how she can stand with pride. Her words sluiced through our fingers as I typed her dictation. At the end of the writing, she said she felt better.
While I wish I could share her poem, it is to be kept confidential. What matters is that she felt the release and recovery made possible by her words between us, a poem she wrote whole.
The sister’s relief felt like the Spirit, working delicately in that fragile place and time. The creative joy was hers—I watched as she stretched backward in her chair, spine arched, hands above her head.
*
Angela Williams Gorrell, an ordained pastor who was funded by Yale to research joy, describes in The Gravity of Joy how she found herself in long, dark months of grief following three deaths in her family in the span of a few months: one to suicide, one to a senseless death, and one—her own father—to opioid addiction.
For a long time after, Angela was closed even to the possibility of joy. She wept endlessly, her husband holding vigil outside the door. Yet, her world opened to joy when she volunteered to lead a Bible study at a women’s prison.
Impossibly, amid spiritual starvation and suicide attempts and grief over children these women sang together. The women led worship, and Gorrell sat back and enjoyed being led, tears streaming down her face. It was then that Angela learned that “joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—amid suffering.”
In joy, Gorrell realized what she calls God’s “witness and withness”—that He is before and beside, a witness who is with us in our sorrow because He has walked it. She describes standing in the gravel parking lot where her brother-in-law took his own life, looking up at a star in a cobalt sky, feeling “a bright sorrow, a kind of transformative, quiet joy.”
When the sister wrote beside me, when I felt her creative joy, that bright sorrow as we were led by her music, it was because her pain was being transformed. God was standing there.
The burden will be lighter.
*
These sisters have been my teachers. They’re teaching me how to listen, how to be near, how to let go, how to feel the heavy grace of being and also to be wonderfully, impossibly light—in the same breath they tell me about a mother that abandoned them the moment they were born, and they crack jokes and show me TikToks and make their own music on desks.
Like a bird with hollow bones made for flight, we can feel the burden and be light.
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all–
One of the sisters wrote a poem about her brother’s face when he cried, about peace—how it felt like winter wind on her face as she sat beneath a tree. She told me she didn’t want to read it aloud because it was sacred.
“Secret or sacred?” I asked, thinking I had not heard her right.
“Sacred,” she said, leaning up against the desk, her poems held against her chest.
*
Rain over glass. The Sound reflects back its own music, struck in blue.
By listening to the flying heart that brought me to this place, letting the listening change me, it feels like I’m pressing my ear to the heartbeat of God, to the force of the human in us that He moves through—not around but through, with, within, a current, a feathered heart.
Tonight, I will walk the beach, stand at the line where tide meets shore, feel the winter wind of peace over my face, see the parakletos emerge like a dove from dark water as snow begins to fall, each a white feather drifting softly to ground.
Hannah Hinsch
Writer & Poet
Hannah is a Seattle-based writer who has published essays in Cultural Consent and Ruminate, poems in Ekstasis and Amethyst Review, and has written for Image journal's ImageUpdate. She was the editorial intern at Image for two years. Hannah finds that writing has always been a conversation—her work emerges in response to the word He has already spoken. She writes to witness, to be caught up in Him over and over again. She writes to be well. Find more of her work at hannahhinsch.com
Photography by Joel Swick