Rejoice

Dear Reader,

Today, along with being “Leap Year Day,” I believe is the last meteorological day of winter. It has continued to be a mild one here in Maine, with only a few respectable snowfalls.

During one of the most recent storms, I simply sat on the sofa for a few minutes in the morning, just watching the snow fall. The drifting flakes were big and fluffy, gorgeous against a background of dark evergreens. I felt many things – peace, calm, wonder, gratitude. I felt reconnected to my earliest memories of watching the snow fall as a child. But one word kept coming back to me, over and over, that summed up my inner experience…

Rejoice.

What a beautiful word.

One definition of rejoice, compliments of the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is “to feel great joy or delight.” Rejoicing is an unfolding experience, a feeling state. For me, that is what I was experiencing internally, in a very quiet way, sitting on the sofa that morning.

I also realized that I do a lot of rejoicing in my life. I hate to admit it, but I probably suppress some of my rejoicing, especially in an outer way, because sometimes society tries to squelch rejoicing.

Otherwise, I might just spend all my days rejoicing! It is a feeling that wells up, unchecked, at the slightest opportunity. In fact, I wonder if all of life is one great act of rejoicing?

Poets often do the word justice  in far fewer words than I. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in the opening of her poem “God’s World,” says, “O World, I cannot hold thee close enough!”

That feeling can be bittersweet, of experiencing profound beauty, yet not quite being able to contain or express it fully. Yet I felt no bittersweetness that morning, watching the snow fall – which leads me to my final realization.

I wasn’t just watching the snow fall – I was, in that moment, the falling snow. The snow and I were one. I experienced a deep knowing, on some cellular level, perhaps in my DNA, that the snow and I shared some commonality, that we came from the same source, that somehow we moved in the same way and expressed – in our own unique styles – the same thing.

So it was when I was a child, and so it is now, unchanging.

May you, dear reader, rejoice in all your days.

I honor your loving heart,

John