Lisa Thorpe

Seeking Delightenment

Sometime last week I heard the word “delightenment” I truly can’t recall where so I can’t attribute it to anyone, but I can confirm that just hearing the word made me smile. And isn’t that really the definition of delight? Delight is an easy breezy emotional moment, so much more attainable than Joy. Joy, it seems to me, is Delight’s more celestial, spiritual, saintly older cousin. Delight is to marvel at or smile with – it is small, it is fleeting. I think that delightenment, like all good things, takes practice. We need to tune the radio dial of our spirit to attend to the extra-ordinary moments, to look and listen and allow ourselves to be surprised, to be filled with wonder at an audacious flower bloom, a lusty bird call or mighty thunderclap. We need to “put ourselves in the way of beauty” as my friend Pat Moore once said to me, to aim the little arrow of our hearts at delight. Last night we were chatting with friends and telling our stories, as friends do, and the topic of childhood pets came up. We each one shared a little vignette, a tableau that said something about the role of a pet in our family sphere. When it came to Jim, he said he didn’t really have any stories to pick out but told us the two dogs his family had over the years were named Happy and Jolly. Just the mention of the names made me smile but then he said quietly that his mother had struggled with the disease of depression much of her life. That really struck me, and I’ve thought about it all the day since. I thought, well she recognized, didn’t she, that she wanted happy and jolly in her life? She literally animated the words in the body of a dog. Or if her family chose the names perhaps they knew she needed those words in her mouth if not her heart. She could at the very least, even on a dark day, say that she had sat with Happy or perhaps witnessed Jolly chase a squirrel. I didn’t know her; I don’t know if it helped her to call out to the back yard in an extended sing song voice H-A-P-P-Y…. J-O-L-L-Y, but surely it can’t have hurt – right? This story is to say I think it takes effort, it takes practice, it takes mindfulness to name the delight, to tell the story of delight to translate delight into art or music or words. But I’m thinking it is an effort worth trying.

I have shared my “Timestamp” art quilts and journal pages in the past (here are a few May and January). But this week I had a revelation about what this art practice is about. It is really a book of Delightenment. When I experience something that sparks delight I take a photo or write a note to remember this thing, this moment, this place, this feeling. And then some of those notes and photos make their way to my (now dubbed) Delightenment sketchbook. I translate my notes, tease out the elements of the moment. And because I’m an artist intent on making art from this delight, I break it down into components of design: color, space, form, line, value, and texture. I write down my impressions of that moment, I start thinking about how to solve the problem of making a transient moment into tangible art. Here is my latest attempt. This is a sound delight. It is the visual translation of a hike in a dense oak woodland surrounded by the electric buzz of cicadas.

I hope you enjoy it, I hope you will put yourself in the way of delight today and again tomorrow, I hope you will call out in a sing song voice H-A-P-P-Y or J-O-L-L-Y, as I intend to do, just to see how it makes you feel.