Don't let them have your joy

Instead, let it guide you back to love.

Hello, Dolphins – Before we dive in, Announcements and New Beginnings:

• The Flow Transmissions: A new way to experience the Guides’ messages of blessing and peace is here!

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  Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

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My cousin was a corporate raider for a time. He worked for a big investment firm, and his job was to identify vulnerable businesses. He would approach the owners with an offer that looked like salvation, a lifeline for companies on the edge of collapse.

But the reality was far more ruthless. Once the raiders took control, they would fire most of the staff, strip down expenses, and restructure the company’s products with lesser materials. Sometimes they’d rebrand the weakened business. More often, they would sell it for parts—liquidating the real estate, the machinery, the name itself. By the end, little of what had been remained.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this process, and how it mirrors what’s happening on a much larger scale. Elon Musk—the man who turned Twitter into a graveyard of its former self—crows about plans to cut $3 trillion from the annual budget. It feels like the same strategy: identifying what’s vulnerable, dismantling it for profit, and leaving us with the scraps.

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I could fall into despair, but I keep waking up with the same dream. I open my eyes in the dark. It’s three a.m. (again) and the same words are running through my mind:

Don’t let them have your joy.

Joy is power. How I respond to whatever comes is my choice. And my choice is the only power I truly control. I choose joy.

Joy is not naive. It is not blind. It is powered by love and tempered by equanimity.

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Last year, the land next to the farm where we live was sold. This month, the trees started coming down, one by one. All of this week, as the air was thickened by the smoke of the wildfires in New Jersey, we could hear the sound of the stumps being ground down. On Sunday—a day that’s normally quiet—they started hauling out the trunks. I couldn’t see it happening but I could hear it - the last remnants of that forest being trucked away to the mill.

The deer have nowhere to go. They wander through our backyard, their home dissolved. My husband saw them one morning and shouted from the back door, Shoo, shoo!

“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified.

“They have ticks,” he said.

“Dear God,” I said. “Their entire habitat is gone. Give them a minute.”

I have written of the deer many times. I feel a special connection with these gentle woodland creatures. Now, at night, I lie awake and send them messages. I imagine them crossing the road, moving from our yard to the farm across the way. I see them walking into the small patch of forest still standing. I imagine them meeting the other deer families there. I send them those images, these quiet telegraphs of safety and direction. Loving them - sending them what guidance I can is the least (and right now, the most) that I can do.

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I’ve been listening to the teacher Byron Katie. Her story reminds me of my own. She was a bitter, lonely, resentful mother of three when her life fell into chaos. At rock bottom, she checked herself into a drug rehab program—not because she was on drugs, but because it was the only place she could think of to go.

And then, something extraordinary happened.

One morning, she woke up lying on the floor of her room in the treatment facility. As she lay there, watching a bug crawl across the floor, she realized something: she was no longer arguing with reality.

That state of inner equanimity stayed with her. It has never left. She says yes to everything, knowing that it is meant to happen. How do I know it’s meant to happen? she asks. Because it’s happening.

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This simple truth—when I argue with reality, I suffer; when I accept reality, I thrive—is slowly, steadily taking root in me.

I’m learning that joy isn’t a reaction to what happens. It’s a state of being that doesn’t waver, even when the trees fall and the deer wander into my backyard, even when corporate raiders dismantle what once seemed untouchable, even when the world feels like it’s dissolving.

Joy is my choice. Even when I am struggling to make sense of what is happening around me, I can STILL choose joy. When I choose joy, I am choosing to respond to the world—not with despair, but with a curiosity that is, more and more, coming from my own realization that no matter what happens, it is happening. My own realization that when I love things as they are, I learn from everything.

Because joy is not fragile. It cannot be liquidated. It cannot be sold for parts. It is a force, and I am, its habitat.

Joy may seem to be lost for a time, but it will always find its way home. It belongs with me just as I belong with Joy.

Iit belongs to itself, and yet somehow, joy is mine.

Don’t let them have your joy.

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Photo by Shana Van Roosbroek on Unsplash

I wish you all the blessings of this season of golden hours and gratitude.
xxoo
Amy

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My dream after the election:
I am ready to complete the ritual … behind me, I see dozens of women arriving, filling all the chairs.

Some posts that comforted and inspired me this week:

• Katharine May: We Have Nothing to Fear from Despair

• Adam Kintsinger: No, I am absolutely not afraid of Trump

• Hello Beautifuls: Right Now, I Cannot look Strangers in the Eye

• Jeannine Ouellette: One Tiny Knot Lets Go