Sunday, December 7, 2014

JOY -- PAINFUL HAPPINESS











Have you ever taken the time to contemplate the difference between joy and pleasure, or joy and happiness, or even joy and sorrow?

I know it as something that is stronger than my thoughts.  Like tears rising to my eyes or sleep taking me away to Neverland, it is something I ALLOW as opposed to something I can make happen.  I can try to create pleasurable times or sensations but it is often something I think about. Joy seems to arise unbidden.

"I experience joy as an emotion that flies past my mental process and has it's way with me." B. Misty Wycoff

I also know that joy often has an element of sadness to it.  We even have the phrase: tears of joy.  Me,  I love those doubled edged moments.  My joy is present because I understand the absence of it.  My pleasure in friendship or human connection is heightened to joy, after a period of loss.  I have burst into tears of joy and completely not understood what I was crying for.  Haven't you?  Why do we cry in movies when the characters have a happiest of endings?  We know.  We know how close they came to not getting it, right?




“To miss the joy is to miss all,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay “The Lantern-Bearers” (1887)



There is a kind of abandon that occurs in moments of joy,  We cannot be cautious and joyful in the same tick of time.  But again I would say that joy outruns it. There is just a little bit of wildness in joy.  A sprinkle of pepper, both for zing and taste and danger.  Unsheathed, unarmored we find a resonance with things larger than us, maybe it is another human, maybe it is what we know as God, or maybe it is just a level of consciousness in which we see the wide horizon of human experience, and we see it at once, in a breath of time.  All of it.  Death and Birth, color and darkness, paralysis and movement, hate and love....all of it limned, adorned, illuminated and embellished with it's opposite.
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Painful Happiness ~ Elizabeth Berg
“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.” 

― Elizabeth Berg

Yes, there is movement, a kind of rushing that makes us want to wiggle and jump, writhe and yell.  It is as if joy has a motor bigger than mine and can outrun me, but as it passes by, I speed up too.  Maybe someday I will live in that energy...only.













Blessings to you this Sunday.  Do be kind to yourself, it is the holiday season, and we are all burdened with some darkness.
Misty December 7, 2014


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