What brings you joy?  What does that word even feel like? For a very long time I could not remember that taste, the smell, the sight, or the sound of this emotion, because it does indeed come in these senses as well.  Joy has reemerged in my life and it comes in unexpected places.  The USPS delivered joy in some tiny prizes from a sweet hearted girl in Atlanta trying to cheer her sad mom up. Joy lives in my home as well. Sometimes it wafts into my bedroom in the form of freshly brewed coffee.

Experiences often expose one to joy.  In watching my son with his first, newly purchased car, relishing the sense that he is free to become what he has worked long and hard to accomplish, I felt a deep joyous love. Several times a week, joy wriggles its way through the body of my pup as she greets me at the door and pees a tiny puddle of yellow to show she can’t quite contain her delight.  It can be lightning quick and even painful at times causing the heart in one’s chest to swell and almost burst as was the sense I felt recently at my oldest child’s wedding watching while she danced with her father to a song they had chosen together.  

Nature delivers daily deposits of joy in the raindrops or crisp snow that it leaves on my lawn.  Joy rises from the trees, who raise their twisting arms in glory to the blue sky that is always there somewhere, even if black clouds hides her true face. The last several years of my life have brought me countless gifts on a daily basis.  Waking up to a sense of the universe as part of myself and myself a welcomed part of the universe has shown me that joy is abundant and ever present and that I merely have to avail myself to my senses and wonder.  

I even have a friend whose name is Joy and she actually upholds that name.  She is a woman who smiles often and shines when it’s real.  She lives with a sense of precision and effort and care that joy resides in.  Not so very long ago I thought it was elusive. I could not call to mind it’s embrace.  Joy and hope were things imagined and talked about only by others in a mean girl way to evoke jealousy and longing.  That, for me, is no longer true.  Joy arises daily in my heart and appears in many forms.

What ways can you find to coax out the joys in your life?