Joy is a Present Bird
Written March 2022
My heart feels broken, and I am content to not know the reason.
Oh, how far I have come, that I can sit here with this feeling in my chest, and not need to know why.
So many times, we’ll never know the answers. So many times, it doesn’t even matter.
How much energy have I wasted in the past, trying to dissect my feelings, to validate or justify them somehow? I just don’t care so much anymore. Am I feeling sad? Ok. I’m feeling sad. I just don’t care why anymore.
How come?
Because experience has taught me that the sad feelings won’t last and because I know that goodness is still mine to behold, to find, wherever and whenever I so choose. I know that even though I am feeling heartbroken for no perceivable reason, I am still feeling good things as well.
Right now I can look at my freshly cleaned and organized feathers, so happily perked up on my bookshelf, and feel the joy in my collection, and feel my deep love of birds, and how that lightens my whole system, if but for a moment. I am still sad. I am still exhausted. Anxiety still has its foot in the door. But because the door is cracked open, the birds make their way in as well. They flutter about, they sing, they drop feathers I collect and place all around my home. They bring me joy.
I used to have a very dysfunctional relationship with joy. So desperate was I, that I tried to grasp it tight, and of course it always slipped through my fingers. And then during the times I actually held it in my hands, I worried it would soon fly away. So you see, I never truly allowed joy in and through me.
I can’t make the sadness go away. I can’t magically heal myself of the exhaustion and anxiety that has been plaguing me all week. Not even the birds can fix that. But they are present. And presence is a big deal.
Can I be present with my sadness? And with my joy? Isn’t that what God is anyway? Present. I AM. Here with us.
Maybe that’s why I am no longer suicidal. I finally realized there is no true escape. Death isn’t an escape from life, for all life is full of death and death is always giving birth to life. How do I know the afterlife won’t just throw me into a whole new life that is also full of pain?
I don’t want heaven anymore. I don’t want it any more than I want hell. I’ve been flung back and forth between the two and I’m exhausted. Let me just stay here on Earth, this precious, precious one Earth; this precious, precious one life. Let me be here with all its sadness and with all its joy.
Let me be here, I AM, fully present, in the way that God is.