Joy, Stubbornly: On mourning doves, making breakfast, and practicing presence in a frightened world

As I write this, I can hear the sounds of the children waking for the day. I'm visiting family at children's home my grandparents founded in 1964. Making breakfast for 30 children presents its own special challenges. So, over the sounds of the mourning dove outside my window I hear why I can only describe as the "joyous shuffle" of a few dozen kids and the people who've devoted their lives to nurturing and protecting them.

And that's really what strikes me as the musical voice of the mourning dove accompanies the simple pleasure of hot coffee on a brisk morning: it's the joy. I'm not talking about raucous celebration. I'm talking about the beam of light that manages to break through, even at the bleakest moments. And it feels like something you should try to cling to, a kind of life preserver in a raging sea.

But then it strikes me that joy isn't something you can put handcuffs on to make sure it doesn't fly away. To possess it as a talisman against impending storms.

Joy is something you practice, or in this case, practice noticing. It strikes me on this brisk morning that it's possible to be surrounded by joy and never stop to notice it, to take a deep breath as a way of fully participating in this one sacred moment. After a while, you look up to realize you've strung enough of those moments together to have put together a halfway decent life.

And that's the thing that feels so impossible to do right now, with the world feeling as uncertain as it does. But joy is all around, but I have to quit doomscrolling long enough to notice.

The mourning dove doesn’t know about the news cycle. The kids in the dining room don’t either, not yet. They’re just hungry, and a little loud, and entirely present in the way that children are before the world teaches them to be anywhere else. My grandparents built something here sixty years ago not because the world was safe, but because joy demanded it anyway. Because someone had to show up and make breakfast.

Maybe that’s what joy is, finally. Not a feeling you chase or a fortress you build. It’s a practice of presence, a small act of defiance against every force that wants to keep your eyes down and your heart closed. It says: this moment is real. These children are real. This coffee, this bird, this brisk morning air filling your lungs.

That’s enough to start with. The rest follows.