Memo to God: I've been demanding and demanding things from You, often quite rudely, in fact often very rudely, like an ill-bred spoilt child, but I think prayer must have made me better mannered or perhaps it's helped me grow up a little and now I should like to say politely: "thank you very much" -- not just for staying with me no matter how unpleasant I was, but for actually moving closer and surrounding me with people who care.
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.