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I am sometimes asked how I can be joyful. People know the story — the loss of Shams, the years of grief. They ask: how do you hold both?
I do not hold them separately. They are not opposites. The joy and the grief come from the same place — the same depth of love, the same capacity for presence, the same refusal to protect myself from what is real.
The grief is not a phase I moved through on the way to joy. The joy did not replace the grief. They coexist. The Divan-e Shams — the poems that came after the loss — is among the most joyful literature I know. It is also saturated with longing. These are not contradictions.
What I want to offer: if you are waiting for the grief to end before you allow yourself any joy, you may be waiting for something that will not come in that form. The grief does not end — it changes shape. It becomes less like a storm and more like weather. Still present, but no longer the only weather.
Joy is not the absence of grief. It is the capacity to be fully present in life while the grief is there. It is the choice to let what is good be good, even while what is hard is still hard.
The two do not cancel each other out. Felt deeply, they amplify each other.
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