been thinking upon joy

A friend picked her word for the year: Joy.

When a friend or you have a WORD for the year and it 
pops up, you send whatever the sentence or page or 
book to her. 

Is it a hope that JOY will arrive this year? 
In what ways?  

In this post on The Rabbit Room by Lanier Ivester,
she writes, 

“Joy cannot be domesticated,”


This means joy cannot be tamed or made fit for cultivation
or to overcome the wildness. 

She continues, 

Joy isn’t a spiritual discipline. Thanksgiving, praise, a cultivated gratitude, yes, absolutely—but joy is a gift, a fruit of the Spirit. We can’t summon, capture or tame it.

and.... 

 But we can’t make joy, or find it.
Joy finds us—in the way of faith, and even when, benumbed with grief or fear or shame or weariness, we stumble out of it.

Today is the first day of Spring. 
May joy find you because as CS Lewis said beauty compels us to possess it.  

                                            a very young daughter , up in her favorite tree
                                                                 10 years ago