Finding Joy Amid the Sadness

A message from and about Carsie Blanton

I’m a big fan of Carsie Blanton, so I get occasional messages from her. They are invariably tossed salads of humor, wisdom, rage, grief, determination, and grace. The one I got this morning is focused on the redemptive potential of joy in a world that sometimes feels beyond redemption. She begins:

Well, this last season of America is pretty disturbing. If it were an HBO series, I wouldn't be able to watch it before bed….

I've been thinking about how joy is the point. Joy is the point of living, the point of working, the point of struggling for a better world. Without joy, these gullible short-sighted mean-spirited humans do not appear to be worth saving. If we don't take breaks for joy, we start to forget.

Indeed. It’s too easy to forget, isn’t it? Much of what motivates me to write is to keep reminding readers (and myself, of course) to remember how miraculous it is to be alive on this pulsing planet. I write to counter the nay-sayers, the neo-Hobbesians, the self-proclaimed “realists” who insist that human life is, will be, and always has been mostly drudgery, struggle, and terror. So stop complaining and get back to work.

The great lie I keep trying to expose is that our prehistoric ancestors were miserable, teetering always on the brink of starvation and destitution. Of course, that’s nonsense. They had better health, more community, more meaning, more leisure…. But nobody wants to hear we’ve been on the wrong path for the past 10,000 years. We cling to the discredited notion of “progress” like survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to the flotsam, counting ourselves lucky.

Carsie goes on,

My job is not ALWAYS joyful, itself, at least not after fifteen years and a couple hundred grand of debt. But it is in service of joy. It's like Ani said: I do it for the joy it brings, because I'm a joyful girl. Because the world owes me nothing, and we owe each other the world.

Nice way of putting it. “The world owes me nothing, and we owe each other the world.”

Carsie is a small, sassy, super-smart giant of talent, courage, and nearly blinding honesty. Sometimes, when I’ve been in a room with her singing in it, I’ve felt indescribable things happening: tears coming to my eyes (joy? despair? poignancy? who knows?), time slowing, a sense that I’m in the presence of something/someone who will be remembered.

When I go on stage - even on nights when I have PMS and my voice is half-gone and some kid just shot up an elementary school - I try to demonstrate that joy exists, that we can bring it to each other, that the world is still worth saving.

Carsie is on tour: all over the US and the UK and Ireland. Go see her. Just do. You’ll feel it. Believe me. She delivers on the joy.