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*Brian Wilcox 'Roododendron ~ Roseum Elegans'
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When we say, "She has joy," we would more accurately say, "Joy has her."
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A merry song from my childhood, "Down in My Heart," George Willis Cook (b. 1848) penned. Recalling the first stanza takes me back to my childhood in the church and evokes good cheer. It reminds me children are often the ones best able to remind us of the innocence and joy we have lost along the way. The first stanza is:
I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart,
I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart to stay.
These lyrics speak to what I write today. Joy is down in the heart, nowhere else, and we can live in a joy that does not leave us. Do you have it? Better, does joy have you?
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A cheerful heart is good medicine,
but a broken spirit wilts the bones.
*Proverbs 17.22
One who has harnessed [by union with the Supreme]
thought and feeling is entirely at ease (or, blissful, joyful)
in cold or heat,
in pleasure or pain,
in honor or dishonor.
*Bhagavad Gita: 6.7.
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Jean Klein, in Living Truth, points out joy is our "homeground." Joy is not something separate from us, something to get other than what we are; we are joy, essentially.
In celebration we use the expressions of life, and the expressions of life can have many forms - music, dancing, singing, painting, play; all kinds of forms which point to beauty. But you know that the real music is after the music, the real dance is after the dance. So that any celebration vanishes in joy and you do not need to go through the celebration form. You do not need to dance or sing. You can go immediately to your homeground.
We can welcome the many ways we express joy. Yet, Klein reminds us joy is none of that. Without joy already being present, we could not encounter joy - joy arises, for joy is. We are mistaken to view joy as something, and we need to get that something; joy is not a something. When we are in our natural being, joy is present, not as a something but as Presence.
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