There’s a particular cruelty to this moment in history: the world keeps offering us reasons to feel bad, and we keep accepting them.

We wake to headlines that dim the morning before it’s barely begun. We scroll—though we swore we wouldn’t—and come up hollow. We sit across from friends at dinner and spend half the conversation in low-grade grief about things neither of us can fix. The ambient hum of collective dread has become so familiar that we’ve stopped noticing it.

And somewhere in all of that, spring arrives anyway.

I’ve been watching it happen for a few weeks—the golden corner of upstate South Carolina responding to warmth with a kind of reckless generosity. Dogwood blossoms where there was bare bark. Birdsong where there was mostly silence. A green so new and tender it almost hurts to look at directly.

Spring doesn’t check in to see whether we’ve earned a respite from difficulty. It simply arrives, insisting on itself. And I’ve been thinking lately that joy works the same way.

Joy doesn’t wait for permission. But we’ve become very good at refusing it anyway.

On Feeling Glad When the World Is Hard

Some of us have developed a strange relationship with joy in difficult times. We feel vaguely guilty about it, as if feeling genuinely glad about the first warm evening, the glass of wine on the porch, the dog stretched outside in a patch of afternoon sun somehow signals that we’re not paying attention. That we’re not taking things seriously enough.

But I want to push back on that.

Feeling wonder at an early-May sky doesn’t mean we’ve stopped caring about what is broken, and if anything, it deepens our capacity to care. When we allow ourselves to receive joy when it shows up, we stay human. We stay soft in the places that most need to stay soft. We maintain the inner life that makes meaningful action possible.

A woman who has let herself go numb doesn’t have more capacity for love and service. She has less.

What Mary Oliver Understood

I’ve been rereading Mary Oliver lately, as I often do when I need to remember something essential. She spent her life writing about the natural world not because she was indifferent to human suffering, but because she understood that close attention is a form of reverence. To look carefully at a grasshopper in the grass, to really see it, its “enormous and complicated eyes,” is not an escape from life, but a way of returning to it.

What Oliver modeled was a disciplined receptivity. She didn’t force joy so much as remain open to it, daily, faithfully, with her whole self.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe: joy doesn’t require our circumstances to change. It requires our attention to shift.

What the Oak Tree Knows

When I step outside right now and feel the sun on my face, actual warmth after the long gray drag of winter, something happens in my body before my mind has a chance to weigh in. Something loosens and breathes. It isn’t earned. It’s a kind of grace.

The Stoics had a concept: amor fati—love of fate, love of what is. Not resignation, but an active embrace of everything life brings: the luminous and the hard, the unexpected gift and the unwelcome loss. Rather than wishing for the life we imagined we’d have, we meet the one we’ve been given, fully, without turning away.

Part of what I find so moving about spring is that it models amor fati without any effort at all. The oak tree doesn’t cling to winter once it’s passed. It simply leafs out, completely, into whatever May decides to bring.

The Texture of a Life

Let me be honest: there are days when I don’t feel joyful, days when the weight of the world, or simply my own inner weather, makes everything feel heavy and gray, even when the sun is shining. Joy isn’t something we feel all the time, or should.

But what I’ve learned—slowly, imperfectly—is the difference between joy being unavailable and joy being refused. Sometimes we grip the hard thing so tightly, and stay so deep inside our own weather, that we don’t look up when the light changes. That’s different from genuine grief or genuine exhaustion. That’s just habit. And habits can be interrupted.

A single moment can do it. Not always, but most days, if we’re paying attention: the particular slant of late afternoon light through a window. The smell of rain on warm pavement. A text from someone you love, arriving for no particular reason.

These moments are not trivial. They are the texture of a life. And our willingness—or unwillingness—to receive them shapes who we are over time.

I don’t want to become a woman who has let difficulty calcify into permanent guardedness. The heart that has been hurt enough times starts to build its own protections, and slowly, without your noticing, the world gets smaller. Less color. Less surprise. Less beauty allowed in.

That diminishment feels like the real danger: not the suffering itself, but the decision, made one small refusal at a time, to stop being permeable to life.

Joy is a practice of permeability. Of remaining available to what is actually here.

I’ve started calling the small ones my joy snacks—those brief, unscheduled moments of delight that don’t ask much of us except to notice them. The first sip of hot tea before the day has any demands. A hummingbird appearing at the feeder for exactly three seconds. A melody that lifts you up in the middle of something mundane. Not grand, mountaintop experiences, something quieter and, I’d argue, more sustaining.

Joy as something we grow, season by season, moment by moment. Not forced. Not performed. But tended, the way you’d tend a garden, with attention, with patience, with love.

Simply Because We're Here

I’m practicing what I’d call radical receptivity: actively seeking joy each day and staying open to it when it shows up uninvited. And I’m practicing grateful living, not as a forced exercise, but as a quiet spiritual discipline, a way of moving through even the hard days with eyes open for what is still good.

Spring doesn’t ask us to choose between the blossom and the thorn. It offers both, simultaneously, and trusts us to hold them.

Joy isn’t waiting for things to get better. It’s available right here, inside the complexity. Inside the difficulty. Inside this irreplaceable day.

The light is changing. The birds are back. May is doing what May does, indifferent to whether we’re ready for it.

Maybe that’s the invitation: not to manufacture joy, not to perform it, but simply to be here for it, present, open, willing to be surprised. To let the world's persistent beauty reach us the way sunlight reaches us—simply because we're here, and the light is too.

Little Bits of Light

Words to open your heart and SOOTHE YOUR SOUL

Thank You for Sharing

How She Thrives!

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