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