What Color is Joy?

This morning I began making macro photographs of a small Rieger begonia plant and a small cyclamen plant that I bought last week. As I was working on the images the question…

What Color is Joy?

popped up in my mind. I decided that today, for sure, orange is one of the colors of joy. Look at the different shades of orange in this single tiny blossom (it’s about 3/4 inches in diameter). If that’s not a recipe for joy, I don’t know what is.

Orange you glad that flowers and other beauties are just waiting for you to notice them?

I love looking closely at the world and noticing all the beauty that is hiding in plain sight.

Today, on this second day of March, I am celebrating sunshine and a warmer weather forecast. “Can this be the beginning of spring?” I ask hesitantly, for fear of jinxing the lovely weather that we are having. Whatever weather the future brings, today I am grateful for sunshine and balmy temperatures (for Minnesota in March).

I am also celebrating feeling a bit better today after another bout of digestive upset that laid me low for a couple of days. Though I am still not able to eat normal food, I am feeling so much better than yesterday.

I didn’t even pick up my camera yesterday or boot up my computer. Though I didn’t feel well I still enjoyed my quiet day. It was a good day to cocoon in flannel pajamas, read a good book, and talk on the phone with my grandchildren.

And this morning I made up for yesterday’s lack of camera play by taking many photographs of the lovely begonia flowers and cyclamen flowers.

I have everything I need…

I have everything I need for a joyful life here inside me. Even when my body is not feeling well I can be present and accepting, I can read or have conversations with family, and look out the windows at the beauty of the world.

By giving our full attention to whatever is before us, we can stay close to what is sacred. Toward this end, we have to understand the nature of practice, so we can be awake enough to feel the patch of wind pressing on the chickadee’s throat. Toward this end, we have to develop our own practice of holding nothing back, so we can be alive enough to feel the delight of someone who was blind who can suddenly see.

…

No one can give voice to what comes through you, though we can find a thousand ways to say, “I love you, I love this life, I love the power of life to inform all the things I can’t see.”

The deeper we go, the more we realize that we are each part of an endless search. It may or may not lead to great accomplishments, but when we can educate the heart, we are very close to everything we need.

   — Mark Nepo, drinking from the river of light: the life of expression

May you walk in beauty.