When thinking about grandma & her influence on me…on us….I feel happiness, pleasure, contentment, love…but something more profound as well…Joy. And although joy is similar to the other feelings it’s something all together different isn’t it. A transcendent feeling-other than happiness-a bigness, an aweness that only fits with the word joy. So while meditating on the word joy, I’d like to share this reflection.

JOY
is a 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 street, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a grandmother: 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 may 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 not only to life but 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 loved one as they create a rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and now 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 and the magnified vulnerability of its imminent loss, 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 the ocean, the sky or a grandmothers face framed by the fields - I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
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‘JOY’