A few years ago someone handed me a printed poem by Joy Harjo. Now folded and dog-eared, this paper has been tumbling around my home as a book marker and nightstand clutter ever since. I reread it as often as it catches my eye. I am a better person for it.
Today I’d like to pick up where I left off on a series of posts honoring some authors whose wisdom has formed me. Today we’ll hear from Joy Harjo.
Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, born in Tulsa Oklahoma. She was appointed poet laureate of the United States in 2019. Besides her ten poetry books, she authored children’s books, screenplays, and plays. Her awards are multitudinous. And she has performed music professionally on flute and saxaphone, because, well, why not.
Here are three lessons I learn about justice from Joy Harjo.
Justice work is soul work.
The poem shuffling around in my nightstand debris is titled, “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet.” This poem is a lesson in justice that comes at us slant, sneaking in by softening up our souls enough to receive what’s beautiful.
In this poem, Harjo draws directly from her Mvskoke heritage to offer some how-to advice for soul care. And soul care is necessary to keep living deliberately in an unjust world. Using the image of a soul that has been lost, she entreats, “Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgement, and human abuse.”
Harjo portrays this task as one requiring the utmost gentleness toward our selves.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes. …
Justice requires bringing your whole self, restored from its tatters. Often we look for solutions to big social problems by turning to social scientists who describe and analyze. I’m one of those, and I believe in that work. But we also need artists, theologians, and poets to remind us that humans are more than a set of problems to solve – we are souls made for love and glory.
Justice work is relational work
In another poem, “Remember,” Harjo entreats readers to “Remember you are all people and all people are you.”
It’s not up to you to choose whether your life makes a difference to others. It’s up to you to choose what difference you make. In the words of ethicist Paul Wadell, “Justice does not create a bond between us and others; it recognizes and honors a bond that is already there.”
Harjo shows us how to recognize and honor those bonds we already have. “Ask for forgiveness,” she advises, and “Call upon the help of those who love you.” Justice requires readiness to rearrange all the wide network of ties you have to people near and far.
Those relations extend to the earth and all the creatures on it. “Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters,” she writes. Often her poetry points to the importance of restoring our relationships with earth and all the forgotten co-inhabitants of it: insects, chickens, stones.
Justice work is slow and ordinary work
I love Harjo’s poetic claim that “The world begins at a kitchen table.” We all must eat to live, she says. Justice is made or ruined in all the ordinary places where we give and receive the necessities of life.
Creating a just society will not be flashy. Nor will it be fast. The journey of your soul’s return, Harjo writes, “might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.” So too, will the journey of repairing our collective society.
In my research, I noticed that people who accept the slowness of justice work are often good at leaning into joy. They know that on this toiling journey, we will all get bored, tired, or discouraged. So they celebrate often. As Harjo writes about what to do when your soul returns, “Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.”
I hope this week you’ll take time to care for your soul in whatever tattered shape you may find it. And take time to notice the people right there at your own kitchen table, and all the web of tables that extend outward from your own.
(What do I mean by justice? See this earlier post to find out.)