And laughter is prayer, too.
The sound of laughter has been echoing through our house. Not mine, but my almost-15-year-old son’s. At night, I hear him on the phone with his friends, giggling for hours. His joy spills down the hallway, fills the spaces of our home, seeps into the quiet corners. And each time, I pause. I take it in. I let the medicine of it land inside me.
It reminds me of when I was his age, sitting beside my best friend, Gina. We were known for our laugh. Loud, wild, heads tossed back, the kind of laugh that erupted daily, easily.
I didn’t know then what I know now: that this kind of laughter is sacred. That it is prayer. That it’s not guaranteed to stay with us forever. Somewhere along the way, for so many of us, the heaviness of life creeps in, and the belly laughs thin out.
In the women’s circles I’ve been leading, we’ve been naming what’s stirring in us, what hungers are asking to be tended. For me, one keeps surfacing again and again: a hunger for playfulness. I crave it in my art, in my friendships, in the way I parent, in the way I love. I crave spontaneity, silliness, the kind of adventure that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Right now, in the thick of midlife with its shifting identities and hormonal upheaval, choosing play feels like a brave experiment, but also like the right move. It asks me to surrender the myth that life’s most important posture is one of seriousness. And it invites me to trust, as Anne Lamott once wrote, that “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”
That’s the spirit behind my new print, Every Giggle. Creating it was a practice in playfulness, a remembrance of the nature that lives within me.
So I’m practicing. I’m letting True’s laughter be my teacher. I’m seeking out the people, the art-making, the moments that invite me to giggle again, not as an afterthought, but as a spiritual practice.
And maybe that’s what I most want to remind us all: every laugh we allow, every moment of levity we make room for, is its own hallelujah.
