Looking for Joy
I’ve walked a long road to find Joy, as she hid herself from me. Discouraged, I gave up searching. Joy was the sweet pup my parents got rid of, because she was too much trouble. I never said goodbye. Joy was the cat my father pushed out the window screen (he said she fell), who wisely ran away. Joy was the sparrow I was nursing back to health who fell in her water dish and drowned (I was at school. I might have saved her). Joy died that day (and many others, before and after). I buried her with the little bird I’d come to love.
There was no Joy in my house, I found it elsewhere. In the fields of wild flowers, natural and free. I watched them turn their faces to the sun, protect each other from sudden gusts, and felt a wonderful companionship. ‘This must be Joy’ I mused (always a thinker). ‘This never wishing to be elsewhere.’ Most often, where I was was anything but comfortable. Anything but happy. I was a great pretender (at school I always made people laugh).
Living without Joy is like a vase of dead flowers in foul smelling water. Blackened, withered, difficult to look at. Try as you might, you can’t picture them as beautiful, can’t remember their enchantment. Sure, you could buy more, or grow your own but what’s the point? Death will take them, will take all of us and doesn’t care a flying fig if you enjoy it. Death has no use for Joy, but God does. God says, ‘Give me your Joy, so I might multiply your blessings. Give it away freely, so it spreads like a field full of flowers. Find Joy in the smallest places, and I will magnify it. Isn’t the world magical, when you’re continuously delighted?’
LBM 10/14/17
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Love Calls
Long ago, when all the
world seemed black to me,
I did not believe in love
and joy was a banquet
with food that was phony
and the colors of the rainbow,
washed drab and gray, ran off
in the gutter like water wasted,
and my tears and my longing
driven deeper than jewels
huddled quietly together
in a prayer for
redemption.
LBM 11/1/99
