I like philosophy, the mental challenge of it. Yet studying philosophy, especially as it is studied these days, can leave me a little broken, for it pokes and dissects what I know to be true, the very things that I have come to trust, things of the psyche, the heart, of spirit. For all its intellectual jewels, and not always, philosophy feels like a wet blanket on exuberance, on the simple joy of being.
So today, I will write about joy. I will rekindle it in my heart, and weave it again into my story, and I will not lie, because I have at times, many times, been truly joyful. I have fallen backwards into the Eternal, saying ‘Hold me’, and It has. A warm light blossoms around me, lifting me into the greater world behind this one, just off centre to let me know that the one world is two – or more – and I am in them all. I dissolve into bliss – So this is what enlightenment tastes like!
But in this world of scientism and skeptics, joy takes work – remembering that there really is God and that I really am part of It, and that we can commune if I can just stop doubting for a moment. For me, the Divine enters only when I open a door – not assertively, as for some mystics and saints or for Neil Walsh…I am not so blessed. I must open my heart, and the only way that I can do that is with gratitude. Ironic that to experience the joy of God, I must first trust that there is something truly to be grateful for.
There always is.
The love of children helps me remember. That, more than faith, holds me up when joy is absent, when I cannot find or feel or believe in joy and it seems so long since I last knew it. Though really, it is just that despair is so convincing, so seductive that one forgets joy, and even three minutes ago is a chasm.
The little cheek that receives my rain of kisses; the perfume of skin; the light in her eyes like the light of the moon when no one but me is awake to receive it – these are joy. The little dimple of frown on a brow; lips juicy as summer fruits; blue blue eyes that bring in the sky; quick, birdlike legs flashing across the sand, these are joy.
Yet always, like a secret within me, I also carry gloom, and it is as black as the bottom of the abyss, dark and whispering death. The memory of sinking into this place is as familiar to me as breathing – I cannot remember ever being without it – and it calls me with a soft voice and kisses my mouth.
So I think of joy as something hard won, wonderful when it rises up, and drawing darkness around it when it departs. But even when it is hidden away, I trust in it, because it is pure Being. Even when I cannot find it, I believe in joy.