Joy in Pursuit of Love and Wisdom! Mel Reads David Whyte in a practice of Gratitude...

Joy made manifest is love.

In the coming weeks, as I work through the editorial process for Vanessa by the Sea: No Matter What the Question Love Always Remains the Answer thought it would be fun to share the joy of reading and releasing words onto the page, infusing them with love and spirit, (in some cases crafting) and in others leaving the jagged edge of inspiration untouched.

May the days ahead bring more wisdom and insight and always Love as we practice untrammeled joy!

Check out this ongoing series on SOUNDCLOUD!  

In this reading on JOY from David Whyte's Consolations the poetic tradition expresses the threshold of joy so magnificently it can be felt on the page dredging deep insights into the heart of the soul's code.

May Joy flourish in your heart and mind and may all your dreams find new light and new vibrations and new loves to grow into all they are meant to be!!

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JOY

is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally 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 other than us.

Joy can be made by practiced, hard-won achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence of those we love understood as gift, going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first spring day or a wood-fire in winter, the last breath of a dying parent as they create a rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and blossoming absence.

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow our selves 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 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.

‘JOY’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Melanie Lutz is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles in a practice of a Love Movement.