Coming-Home
It's so easy to become confused in this life. We lack for teachers, or we don't lack for distractions--

--I'm not sure what it is.

I've always been told that joy is a solitary emotion... that it leaves you naked. But I've never found it to be true. Pleasure, yes. Pleasures of the body, fleeting things of the mind and flesh, those things have always felt profoundly alienating.

But joy? Joy is being connected to everything. It's throwing your head up to the sky as you dance and seeing the ripple of distant blue clouds against a black sky and there being nothing between you and it and you rise...

...it's melting back into the river...

...it's a profound expanding outside your own boundaries. And it's meant to be shared.

I really do believe in my heart that joy is communicable. Not pleasure, not the vicissitudes of flesh... but that divine coming-home. It's meant to join us to one another as well as to the universe. And you are never stronger, nor more unassailable, than when you are in that place. You could be at the mercy of the worst violence and still be untouched.

This is why, when something touches me in public, I try to remember to lift my head and cry without shame. Or dance. Or laugh. This is why I write or draw the things in my heart and let them go. This is why I think of art as a moral act... and feel no difference between writing about my fencing or my aliens. It's all the same wellspring.

Life is profound when you're always reaching past the skin. I often fail. But the more I try, the more I succeed--




Stardancer Home.