#10 Happy Birthday to the Joyful Gods 2023

Celebrating the Birth and Rebirth of the Gods of Joy
December 27-31, 2023

The Joy Calendar includes nine months, each of forty days, so that our year “ends” after 360 days, leaving five days outside of the calendar. The ancient Egyptians had something of the same accounting issue, and solved it by reserving the five ‘intercalary’ days for the birth and rebirth of the great gods: Osiris, Isis, Seth Nephthys, and the elder Horus.

The “Lady” whom I serve suggested I imitate those wise Egyptians, and declare the five days that come at the end of the Joy Year as a time to celebrate five divine aspects of joy, and to utilize the five fingers of our hands to delineate them. And help us remember who they are.

• • • • •

December 27: Birthday of the gods who take great joy in humankind, and also invite us to experience the joy and the privilege of having a human lifetime.

Tasting dark chocolate,
A ripe apricot,
A luscious elixir—
Savor the expanding joy in your body.
Nature is offering herself to you.
How astonishing
To realize this world can taste so good.

When sipping some ambrosia,
Raise your glass,
Close your eyes,
Toast the universe.
The Sun and Moon and Earth
Danced together
To bring you this delight.
Receive the nectar on your tongue
As a kiss of the divine.
• Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras, number 49

• • • •

December 28, Birthday of those divine beings who provide joyful guidance and direction, and who delight with us when we recognize and follow our true path.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
–William Stafford

• • • •

December 29, Birthday of those joyful archetypal beings who exult in our human capacity for passionate living and engagement.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
–Dr. Martin Luther King, spoken on August 28, 1963, whose dream is still passionately alive, deserving and needing fruition today.

• •

December 30, Birthday of those holy ones of joy who understand, sustain, and rejoice in beauty and the creation of beauty.

Beauty is the harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us; the eyes, the ears or the imagination suddenly become a bridge between the here and the there, between then and now, between the inside and the outside; beauty is the conversation between what we think is happening outside in the world and what is just about to occur far inside us.
Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the selfe-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other. Beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world.
–From Consolations, by David Whyte

Patti Kaufman’s Dark Mother.

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December 31, Birthday of the gods whose joy-filled powers are so rich, so powerful, that they overflow; from heavenly cascades of joy, these holy ones can instill profound, eternal joy into the deepest places of soul and the highest flights of spirit.

Abandon, O Heart, all else, and follow Love;
The People of Truth have ever followed Love.

Love precedes all that exists and is known,
No beginning could they find for Love.

After all is perished, Love goes on,
Thus they said: “There is no end for Love.”
–From The Architect of Love, byNiyazi Misri