Sitting in my living room, with the eternal buzz of the computer in the background, I think about the definition of the word “joy”. No dictionary can give me what I am looking for. I am searching not for meaning but for description. Not for description of what causes joy, but for description of feeling itself.
Joy is a smile I say. But not the external smile, the child’s smile, the mother’s smile, the kind stranger’s smile. It is not your smile, it is an internal, smile of the heart. It is a lightness, a song, a bursting, a dance. Not a song you sing, or a dance you dance, but song you wish to sing, a dance you want to dance. It is the bubbling bursting sense of the infinite, where there is infinite possibility.
What else could joy possibly be? Nothing could possibly give us joy outside of us, all that outside of us can do is help us connect to sense of possibility. Joy becomes sacred when we look deep into that well that holds the eternal waters. This where joy becomes divine, this when joy cannot be taken away, because it exists in that place, close to the fountain itself.
Every other joy can be taken, the lover might leave, the job might dissolve, the newborn might not live. Unless our joy springs from pure infinite possibility, it cannot be lasting, because nothing really is.
So, have I had this experience. Nothing is simple, and I think I have, and you have, but it is often not pure. It is a mixture of our sensing the possibilities we consider wonderful, and a connection to the infinite, where it is always undescribable, eternally wonderful. But we allow the small doomed joys to close our eyes when they pass, thinking that is all we had.
Joy is a smile I say. But not the external smile, the child’s smile, the mother’s smile, the kind stranger’s smile. It is not your smile, it is an internal, smile of the heart. It is a lightness, a song, a bursting, a dance. Not a song you sing, or a dance you dance, but song you wish to sing, a dance you want to dance. It is the bubbling bursting sense of the infinite, where there is infinite possibility.
What else could joy possibly be? Nothing could possibly give us joy outside of us, all that outside of us can do is help us connect to sense of possibility. Joy becomes sacred when we look deep into that well that holds the eternal waters. This where joy becomes divine, this when joy cannot be taken away, because it exists in that place, close to the fountain itself.
Every other joy can be taken, the lover might leave, the job might dissolve, the newborn might not live. Unless our joy springs from pure infinite possibility, it cannot be lasting, because nothing really is.
So, have I had this experience. Nothing is simple, and I think I have, and you have, but it is often not pure. It is a mixture of our sensing the possibilities we consider wonderful, and a connection to the infinite, where it is always undescribable, eternally wonderful. But we allow the small doomed joys to close our eyes when they pass, thinking that is all we had.
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