summer wild

Sunday, July 27th, 2025

It seems like an odd time to write about joy.

Even the experience of it feels like a rebellion.

Though I didn’t like when Taylor said that to me. I didn’t like the suggestion that to be joyful was to be defiant. To me, that’s like adding a little bit of angst to what feels so pure and so giving of light. But, admittedly, I do understand what he means and these days, I think we all do.

On January 12th, I published a blog post naming this the year of trust. I also aptly noted that this was the year I wanted to emerge from my grief into the space of being able to feel joy and really feel it. In my body, in my being. Every healing journey includes these polarities of joy and grief, light and dark. Destruction and building. I believe that both are necessary- it is repression to focus “only on the good”, banishing your pain and your sadnesses deeper and deeper (note: please do not listen to anyone who avoids your tough feelings by simply advising you to not focus on them). At the same time, to spend so much energy on the grief, on the pain, is to ignore the joy, the vast potential for joy! This dance, this back and forth, this holding of two truths is so quintessential of the healing journey… of life itself.

And we hold them right now. We hold them each time we experience such beautiful happiness in our individual lives against the backdrop of collective human suffering, of which there is an impossible amount. We can’t erase this fact. But we must dance with it. To be singularly happy is to be ignorant to the plight of others. But to deny your own joy is to snuff out a light we all so desperately need. And deserve.

This vacation became my joy, his joy and our joy together. And I felt it, all the way from my suntouched cheeks down to the tips of my little toes in the salty ocean. A most incredible moment in time. All in the expanse of the west coast summer wild.