Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday ADD Irregulars and Vagabonds of the WSN! Some days it is just good to acknowledge each community and the members that comprise it without grouping it with the other Local souls have met elsewhere.

More thoughts from Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. This book has been a wonderful bridge between the love of words and the deeper spiritual meaning that words can convey. It pushes up against reflections upon logos and washing over into areas of semiotics, hermeneutics and the broader topics in epistemology.

JOY

Few things will attract people to you or your passions than the joy with which you embrace them. It is one of the most intoxication realities in life. What or who brings you joy is so amazing as to seem almost magical and all consuming. Joyful people are naturally attractive, the joyless are universally repulsive. I don't mean sorrowful or trouble souls, I mean joyless, embittered souls who feel that life is not a gift but an obligation that some cosmic reality or social community failed to deliver. The joyless souls are multiplying, people seduced that life owes them something, that they have been cheated by the joy and prosperity of others. The joyless are the envious, and they will never now any solace let alone experience the joy they so resent. Enough Tommy-boy, on to David Whyte and his wisdom. I am sure I will have more ramblings to share. 😁

JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter. The sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was radically other than us.

Self-forgetting - so, so, so much the opposite of this current chapter of reality in the WEST when self-obsession has mutated into the intersectionality wars and grievance mongering at previously unseen levels. It is a bitter irony that when I obsess about myself I have a far greater chance of never understanding who I am.

dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter. So, so many joys in life. Once one is open to the gift of living, life can become an endless parade of joy. There will always be trials, sorrows and disappointments, but there are so many hidden and surprising joys to be received and celebrated in life. It is difficult not end my the majority of my days in gratitude.

Sheer intoxicating beauty - it is one of the reasons I look for all those barn and other photos that I so often post with these posts. It is one of the things I find most hopeful about social media when I see expressions of beauty in your shared photos and musings here. There is so much more beauty in life than ugliness.

To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source: the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face. I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.

Untrammeled - a word seldom seen or used. Fun stuff with words!!!! I noticed that spell check prefers the one L instead of two LLs. I speak 'Merikan, not English. 😉

To become fully generous - that is a praiseworthy goal for our striving. I suspect it is something like humility, when you pass that threshold, you don't know it, but everyone around you does as they become the recipients of your generosity of heart. The laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness, strength, solace and a source - such a gift with words to open up a well of meaning on just a single word/reality called joy. David Whyte has some great things to share between these two paragraphs, but it is often better for you to come and see rather than letting me ramble on. Have a great day Digital Neighbors!

Western Maine Barn by Alana Ranney