practicing delight

In The Book of Delights, Ross Gay offers a series of short essays that celebrate wonder and delight. Gay’s practice of delight is simple. In his words: “I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.” (xi)

Gay’s book is a stunning meditation on the wonder, beauty, and delight of the everyday. It’s also an invitation: what might it mean for us to approach our own lives through a practice of wonder, delight, and joy. What happens when we look for pops of everyday joy? What might we see that we’ve never seen before? What might it mean to look - and to dream - anew? What might we learn about ourselves?

The photos below, which I update once a week, represent moments of joy and delight for me, moments where I paused not only to look, but to look again.

What might your practice of delight look like?