Inside everyone

is a great shout of joy

waiting to be born.                                  –from The House of Belonging by David Whyte

   Among the many things hanging in my office is a handmade sign with one word on it: Yes.

   "Why the sign?" lots of people ask me.

   "Because I need to remember," I usually respond.

   In a world filled with conflict, grief, hostility and frustration, it is easy to forget the yes of life – to forget that "inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born."  When do we give birth to our joy and how do we do that?…

   Part of the difficulty in releasing our shout of joy flows from the way many of us confuse joy with happiness. Happiness is a bouncing ball which drops into our lives with a perplexing randomness. My two-year old grandson can shift from sad to happy (or vice versa) in a split second based on the skill of his parents in shifting his attention or his own idea of whether he likes what’s in front of him or not. His happy/sad dance looks simple. Ours may feel more nuanced & complex. Yet both seem to rest on shifting sands.

   Joy, once understood and developed, rests on steadier ground. Joy flows from faith in God or belief in Love. To me, they’re the same thing.

   Joy is an energy that, once released, graces our lives to the end of our days.

   Grief lives in us as well. We grieve our fundamental loneliness and we grieve the periodic loss of those who seemed to free us from the pain of isolation’s trap.

   David Whyte’s poetic wisdom speaks to us again: I have my few griefs and joys/I can call my own/and through accident it seems,/ a steadfast faith in each of them/and that’s what I will say/ matters when the story ends.

   For many caregivers, Joy struggles for air beneath an ocean of grief connected to the pain they work with each day or night (or both.) It’s time to free this Joy so that it may balance and inform our grief rather than be drowned by it. When Joy is freed from within, grief becomes tolerable as her subordinate. We can live through grief’s storms because of the sure knowledge that the sun lives above the black roof of clouds.

   Today is the day for us to shout our Yes to the world, to let her rich voice sing through the rest of our days & nights.

Reflective Practice:

The journey to freeing Joy begins with the practice of gratitude. Reflect today on the many gifts of your life. Start with the remembrance that you are a child of God’s Love.

To read and hear more of David Whyte’s work, go to www.davidwhyte.com