Be Joyful
Though you’ve considered
All the facts!
– Wendell Berry
I used to confuse Joy with happiness.
As I age, I recognize the distinction.
This has been very helpful for me.
Rumi famously wrote:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and right doing,there is a field.
I’ll meet you there”.
With gratitude, I offer:
“Out beyond happiness and sorrow
Beyond pleasure and pain
There is a field
I will meet you there”
This field is illuminated by our capacity for (loving) Awareness.
The “True I” of Awareness is the light before opinions or distinctions.
In the words of Gene Gendlin, it is the “I” without content.
Happiness comes and goes, usually connected to an external situation.
Joy is an underlying condition connected to a sense of wholeness, belonging and gratitude just for being alive.
Pleasurable circumstances can bring momentary happiness.
A sunny day at my daughter’s wedding brings happiness.
Feeling the love for her in my heart, even if it rains, evokes Joy.
Reading about starving children in Gaza, unspeakable cruelty in Sudan, power abuses by Trump and Putin bring a kind of helpless melancholy, along with periodic outrage and disgust. Sorrow for the world is natural when our hearts are open, this is compassion.
This morning I sensed a heavy melancholy. Then, upon hearing Beethoven and seeing the translucent leaves gently blowing in the wind, I was reminded of the deeper Goodness, Beauty, and Joy that is alive in my heart whenever “loving awareness” is present. Both were alive together.
This inherently joyful state exists beyond and before the momentary conditions of good/bad, pleasure/pain. More than happiness, it is a sense of harmony with Life.
Cultivating this awareness, this remembrance, is a main gift of a spiritual path.
Sorrow and Joy can live together, Must live together.
Looking only at the “positive” insulates us from pain and also from compassion – this avoidance is not helpful for growing loving hearts.
Yet, lingering in the swallowing quicksand of injustice and sorrow is not helpful.
In the evocative words of Jack Gilbert:
“To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil”.
Freedom lies in our capacity to harness the potent forces of intention and attention. This includes deepening our capacity for “Joyful Melancholy”.
Each Moment is a Moment – Worthy of Your Presence
For me, honestly/authentically living in painful moments sometimes means surrendering to that helpless, hopeless sadness, 100%. Then, in pleasurable moments, it means a Zorba-like full embrace with unbridled happiness. Deeper than these polarities, we can learn to sense what is “underneath” and “larger than” the ever-changing waves of unpleasant and pleasant moments.
More urgently, it means growing our capacity for “Joyful Melancholy”, allowing the injustices/suffering of life into our hearts while also standing-up for an unshakable commitment to this almost unimaginable gift of a shared, conscious Life. THIS remembering and standing-up, while difficult at times, is a profound choice we can make many times each day.
There is always a gift in each moment – either in the foreground of our experience or resting gently in the background. The light of awareness is free from preferences, from liking/not-liking. Evolution has taken billions of years to grow this awareness – we are the place where Life becomes conscious of Itself!
Returning to THAT, without denying anything, is a worthy path. It reveals the ever-present possibility of gratitude, love and Joy. Even our “salty tears of deep sadness” have a very subtle Joy in the background. There is Love in those tears. We are alive, we care, we are viscerally and psychically connected to this shared Life. “Loving Awareness” takes us into the illuminated field beyond the temporary states of right/wrong, pleasure/pain and happy/sad. It returns us home.
Love what you love, even if the house is burning.
Something unanticipated will come next.
Choose to celebrate the little gifts of everyday life and remind your friends.
I sent this Jack Gilbert poem to a few of you recently, read it again.
I encourage you to print it out and take it into your heart
(especially the bolded paragraph).
Sending Love, Blessings and Joy…
Russell
A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.