#3 Joyful Awareness 2019

Practicing Joy in the World
March 22 – April 30

The Month for Joyful Awareness

Singing Image of Fire
A hand moves, and the fire’s whirling takes different shapes:
All things change when we do.
The first word, “Ah,” blossoms into all others
Each of them is true.
—Kukai, translated by Jane Hirschfield, quoted in
The Enlightened Heart by Stephen Mitchell

Springtime makes it easy to embrace Awareness with joy. Poets and mystics outdo themselves describing the wonders of spring. Shakespeare’s Perdita describes “daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty,” continuing on with a paean of praise for violets, lilies of all kinds, primroses, all the flowers of this bliss-filled season.

Gerard Manley Hopkins ecstatically proclaims “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring…”

These poets throw open the doors of our perception, and lure us into greeting the world and all its beings with a joyful “Ah!” sensing this time of new life as if for the first time.

Kukai, the gentleman who reminds us that “all things change when we do,” and that from our first “Ah” everything blossoms, comes to us as a 9th Century Japanese Zen master. He was one of the first to believe and to teach that in essence we are all enlightened. And that attaining awareness of this enlightenment can be accomplished in one lifetime, this lifetime.

Perhaps we draw ever closer to his teaching with the soft sound of “Ah.”

Mary Oliver, the poet/inspiration for this year of Joy, has said that attention is the first step toward devotion.

The Path for Joy, which we follow with this calendar, takes us from Joyful Awareness (similar to Oliver’s “Attention”) toward deeper and effective caring for our world, our community, our selves.

We can begin again on this path for joy by meeting the world, all our friends, the robins, the squirrels, the daffodils, with a delighted sound, “Ah.” Remembering that “everything changes when we do.”

Joy in the World
And in all things.