Happiness is who you are: Joy is the living!

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.”
~ Kahlil Gibran

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Joy, you know all too well that you alone are the word I dangle as a crystal pendant around my neck! I harken to you whispering  prayers and blessed incantations calling forth your redolent sweet spirit. I welcome and embrace the cadence of  your breathing into my heart, my mind, my life. JoY, you are my inner home. Joy, you are wings that give me flight. Joy, you are my sanctuary.  Joy, you are my living.

The days and the minutes and the hours can be trying. There is sadness, there is confusion, there is pain. My moments do not always reflect the genuine generosity of laughter's bidding. Downtrodden, even and at times half sick, I weep for peace because the world that surrounds me does not reflect the peaceable unpretentious quiet I have inside. This world is akin' to the mythical Babel. It is noise and perturbation; I am rattled that it will not get along with how I opt it to be.

It still surprises me how people can be cold and callous and rude. Even the affection that I give is thwarted and flung back in animosity. This blankets me in anguish, and though I am never one to look back at whatever fortune might have abided, and though I do not dwell in regret,  and though I turn the other cheek, still, yes, still... I share the plight of Lot's wife: petrified - reduced to a grotty' pillar of salt!

 In my darkest hurts, I shelter in a corner where I listen to my soul's faint moan for flight from this temporal body. And my being lets out a question even Richard Dawkin's has yet to spew an answer for. Who was I before I was me? Where was I before I am here? 
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And then from nowhere the Spirit of Joy reminds me:  

“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. the world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.” ~ Marianne Williamson

So that is the answer --> to love the world, just LoVe.

• Love even the foreboding corners of veiled heartaches. 
• Love compassionately even the tangled web of uncertainties that hover.
• Love even the hallow, the crookedness and ungratefulness that assaults. 
• Love, as Rilke conceded, even the questions themselves. 
• Love the peace and even the noise.
• Love even the darkness of the world

For if you do not love it all, then who will? Instead of railing, one must do a surrendering; In doing so one softens the world's abrasiveness. And just as a candle fairly casts it's glow, the world's somber dimness that pervades is gently illuminated by our surrender to love. There is no other way for we are annointed  to be Lightworkers. I have to love it all.

Now as I breath and relax and center my being, inspiration reminds me to take heart a deeply personal truth.
"Happiness is who you are and joy is the living!