#3 Joyful Awareness
Practicing Joy in the World
The month of Joyful Awareness
March 22 to April 30
“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring…
What is all this juice and all this joy?”
For poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring, with all its juice and joy, new life flagrant and fragrant everywhere, is the Earth’s yearly re-creation of the way it was in Paradise.
Who better to hold all this beauty and glory than the goddess of Love and Beauty, in all her world-wide manifestations.
She is most familiar to us in the West as the unmatchable Aphrodite, Greek name for the potency that is Her mystery and ever-recurring miracle.
Blown by the gentle west wind over the deep ocean, she reaches us rising from the soft sea foam. In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, she is welcomed to the earth by graceful nymphs called the Hours. They adorn her with jewelry and array her in splendor.
Sounds like the Awareness of Joy, especially in the spring.
Aphrodite reminds us that joy is a song of aliveness, and what feels more alive than our world in this abundant season. The tiny green leaf daring new life along the willow’s branches. The gallant blossoms luxuriating in abandoned welcome to the bees. Urging them to their magic so that, come summer, we too may luxuriate in ripe peaches and plums and pears, walnuts and almonds.
Then there are the crocuses, the violets, the daffodils, the camellias madly in love with the sun and willing to display their love for all to see. Truly nothing is so beautiful as Spring!
Aphrodite, this embodiment of Joyful Awareness, challenges us with these questions:
Is it possible to allow Joyful Awareness to become so potent that it grows into love? Can you follow that progression, stay with it sweetly enough, long enough to experience it becoming love? For the lone violet, the profligacy of camellias, the brave stance of daffodils?
And, is it possible to find beauty in all things, even those that seem unfamiliar, unpleasant, even ugly? Can your sense of Joyful Awareness become so powerful that it helps you transmute the mundane, the difficult into beauty?
These are the blessings of Aphrodite and her sisters who bring love and beauty to the entire world. Become aware of Joy, and all its cornucopia of gifts. Joy is. In the world.
The next month is Joyful Acceptance, and you’ll meet the Goddess of that month soon. Buy the calendar:
The Lady’s Year of Joy: The Calendar
Explore a Ninefold Path that brings, finds, celebrates, enhances and strengthens Joy. The year consists of nine months, each named for a step on the Ninefold Path, and each with 40 days. It is perennial, that is, not tied to any particular year. Each month is divided into four weeks of ten days each, and each week is devoted to one of the elements, Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. $15.00 plus shipping
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