Tuesday, April 5, 2022

joy


is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self
forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in
communion with what formerly 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
arrived 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 ourselves 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.





David Whyte
Consolations
Photo: Peter Bowers