Find a place inside where there’s joy and joy will burn out the pain.” ~ Joseph Campbell
Have you ever felt like you are given word clues by divine guidance that expands your awareness and opens up new worlds of curiosity and opportunity? I feel it all the time. The randomness of it both surprises and delights me. It makes me look forward to the word adventures that await me.
Here is an example of what I mean. As soon as I seen the trailer for JOY, I knew I had to see the movie the moment it came out. I have a borderline obsession with true life stories where the artist or inventor’s resilience, passion and determination helps them overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to pursue and achieve their dreams. There are not enough of these types of movies. I wish there were enough to have dedicated TV space like romance movies fill the Hallmark channel so the world could be inspired 24/7 instead of the depressing apocalypse-type stuff that fills the airwaves.
A few of these average person turned entrepreneur docudramas have stood out to me: Coco Chanel about a woman who started out making hats and built a fashion empire, Big Eyes about the artist Margaret Keane staring Amy Adams, and Flash of Genius Starring Greg Kinnear who played Robert Kearns, a guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers. So, JOY a movie about Joy Mangano (portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence), a women with grit who invented the Miracle Mop, was a must see! I loved it. I can always tell when it’s a good story because watching the movie makes me want to learn more.
Then a friend asked me if I had heard of “C.S. Lewis and the Northernness”… I have heard of C.S. Lewis and have been a fan of his Narnia books since I was a child, but I have never heard of “Northernness” before, so of course I did what everyone does and Googled it. Guess where it led me? A couple places, one the vast world of “Northernness” which I didn’t know existed and to C.S. Lewis’ autobiography “Surprised by Joy” about his journey to faith and Shadowlands about his wife JOY…
See how that works? The word JOY is leading me on an exciting and enlightening journey. I love the joyful adventure of words!
Write on,
WriterKat
“Pure Northernness engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. …And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of JOY itself…” ~ C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
What was C.S. Lewis’s definition of ‘joy’? from :redux on Vimeo.
WriterKat 