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.
Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It
is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that
seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
~ "The Bright Field" by R. S. Thomas