A Return to Joy...

4 hours ago
3 min read

Years ago I began a series called A Return to Joy. At the time, I knew instinctively that it was the right name, but I didn't yet understand why. I thought I was painting toward something I hoped to find. Now I wonder if I was painting toward something I had forgotten.

Over the past several years, life has initiated me in ways I never could have imagined. The Lahaina fires took 169 pieces of my artwork. Earthquakes in Bangkok shook and cracked the walls of our family home. And in the years surrounding my mother's final chapter and passing, truths emerged from the rubble of my family that changed me forever.

There are some journeys that do not end neatly. Some questions remain unanswered. Some losses cannot be repaired. Yet alongside the grief, the uncertainty, and the dark nights, something unexpected began to reveal itself.

Joy.

Not happiness chased or manufactured. Not the fleeting pleasure of a vacation, entertainment, or acquiring something new. This is something quieter, deeper, and strangely indestructible. It bubbles up for no apparent reason while swimming in a river, watching light move through the trees, painting into the early hours of the morning, standing in line at the grocery store watching the world go by, or simply sitting in stillness.

I have begun to wonder if joy is not something we create at all.

Joy is less something we create than something revealed when enough of what obscures it falls away.

Many of us have spent decades carrying messages...spoken and unspoken...that we are not enough, not safe, not worthy, not acceptable as we are. We become vigilant. We strive. We perform. We protect. Or we settle for a very muted life and become afraid of expressing ourselves authentically and truthfully. And some of us become successful by many outward measures while quietly carrying fear and shame beneath the surface.

Then, often in midlife, life asks something different of us.

Not to become more.

But to uncover what has always been there.

That uncovering is rarely gentle. It comes through loss, disappointment, disillusionment, and the slow excavation of the self. It asks us to look honestly at what is broken, what was never what we believed it to be, and what still longs to live.

And then, almost mysteriously, there are moments when the system relaxes. Not because life has become easy. But because something inside no longer believes it must constantly chase the acceptance and approval of others or its very right to exist...that we are already full in simply being here now. In those moments, joy quietly appears...not as something we have achieved, but as what naturally remains when we stop carrying what was never ours to carry.

Perhaps that has been the true meaning of A Return to Joy all along.

Not a journey toward joy, but a return to what was never actually lost.

Perhaps that is also why this series has become my most widely collected body of work and why I continue to receive so many requests for commissions within it. I used to think people were responding to the wonderful colors, movement, or composition of this painting series alone. Now I wonder if what resonates is something much harder to put into words...something that quietly reminds us of the wholeness that has always been within us.

Life will continue to test us. Sometimes those tests are so great they crack open the very structures we built to survive. But perhaps it is through those cracks that something ancient and untouched begins to shine...not because suffering is inherently good, but because it often provides us the gateway to discover something far richer and greater about ourselves that was always there.

Something remains.

Something untouched by the changing circumstances of this life.

Perhaps that is what life has been trying to show me all along...joy is not something we earn, achieve, or create. It is what radiates forth from and as ourself when enough of what is not truly us falls away.