_____________Joy_____________
is the meeting place
of deep intentionality and self forgetting,
the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us
in communion with what formally seemed outside,
but is now neither,
but become a living frontier,
a voice speaking between us and the world:
dance, laughter, affection,
skin touching skin,
singing in the car,
music in the kitchen,
the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter:
the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited
as an edge between what we previously thought was us
and what we thought was other than us.
Joy can be made
by practiced, hard-won achievement
as much as by an unlooked for,
passing act of grace
arriving out of nowhere;
Joy is a measure of our relationship to death
and our living with death,
Joy is the act of giving ourselves away
before we need to or are asked to,
Joy is practiced generosity.
If Joy is a deep form of love,
it is also the raw engagement
with the passing seasonality of existence,
the fleeting presence of those we love understood as gift,
going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas
of the first spring day or a wood-fire in winter,
the last breath of a dying parent
as they create a rare, raw, beautiful frontier
between loving presence
and a new and blossoming absence.
To feel a full and untrammeled Joy
is to have become fully generous;
to allow our selves to be Joyful
is to have walked through the doorway of fear,
the dropping away of the anxious worried self
felt like a thankful death itself,
a disappearance,
a giving away,
overheard in the laughter of friendship,
the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength,
a solace and a source,
the claiming of our place in the living conversation,
the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain,
a sky or a well loved familiar face
I was here
and you were here
and
together we made a world.
* * * * * * * * *
Joy
From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words
by David Whyte
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