Joy

 

Joy and grief come in through the same open door of the open heart.  Because joy cannot be pinned down (that is what makes it joyous) joy is infused with grief.  When the layers of armor protecting the heart dissolve and the heart becomes tender and open, both grief and joy seep in like a fog rolling through the valley at dawn.  Closing the door to grief necessarily closes the door to joy. 

 

Joy like grief cannot be manufactured.  They are experiences that take us by surprise and catch us off guard.  And they are intertwined with each other.  I catch a song on the radio and am suddenly back with an old friend long gone dancing together on a Saturday afternoon.  I see an old woman struggling to stand and am softened with memories of my grandmother whose knees ached when she stood.  I am with myself at the end of a restful Sunday afternoon my heart aching in a spacious peace that overwhelm at work had darkened.

 

On a recent Saturday, the heavy sadness of my inner landscape mirrored the outer cold and grey.  I took to the nearby woods for movement, solitude, and spaciousness.  After settling into the rhythm of walking, my senses sharpened and penetrated the forest landscape.  My ears tuned to the rill of the thrushes, my skin bathed in wind and rain, my eyes received the deeper reds and purples of the floor litter like paintings at an exhibition coming into focus. The understory was so dark that the ferns and lichens seemed to glow in florescent shades of greens.  By the lake, I paused to watch the dance of the swallows dipping low then rising up through elegant swirls and whirls. The water was dark except when the wind rippled the surface into silvery shards that sent shivers down my spine. The ancient boulders left by long melted glaciers stood by steady and calm.  They held me in their ancient conversation.  In my tenderness, I felt myself part of the weave of the landscape inhaling in the magnificence, exhaling its preciousness. If I tried to hold it all in my heart, the dancing swallows, the rippling waters, the boulders steady and ancient, they would cease to be these things.  The beauty, the joy, comes from the impossibility of collecting such things, the necessity of letting it go.

 The window to joy and grief is the opening to God.