Jon Rappoport – In the house of joy, winter fades away not only because of hope, or dreams, or the determination to follow a new path, but because for a hundred thousand years people have been, through gesture and word, transmitting to one another the idea that joy exists.

No matter what the present moment suggests—any present moment—that idea has been passed from hand to hand and mind to mind.

The odds don’t matter, the “score” doesn’t matter, the conditions don’t matter; the idea lives.

If this doesn’t say something about the human race, nothing does.

Problems, mistakes, tragedies…and still the idea is never eliminated.

There is more than the transmission—there is the invention. Joy is invented and reinvented time and time again—as if it were a secret that must be maintained. And so it is.

As children, we found it every spring. The winter was devastating. It wiped out all life. It froze life. How could anything come back? Impossible. But, just as now, outside my window, spring always made a return, unstoppable—sometimes it came back in the space of a few days, and we couldn’t see it happening until it had happened. Spring waited until you and everyone else weren’t looking, and then it broke through. Spring knows how to play a game.

For some reason, trees don’t seem to care about newspapers or television news. They’re on their own timetable. They set their own pace. How many branches on all the trees in the world are there? They all know what to do and when. They don’t have to wonder or plan or consider. It’s time for leaves, for green. Now.

Here they come.

When we feel joy as we’re in the middle of green, we could conceal it and bury it and go off in a dozen directions, but we never do. Not entirely. We stand on a road or a street or a field and when we meet another person, we make some gesture with our hands or we say a few words and we both look out and see the trees and we know.

We’re in the house of joy. We’re there. It’s not hard to understand.

We’re in a kind of game, and we have a new chance of winning. In this game, no one is ordered or destined to lose. Isn’t it strange?

In these moments, we don’t have to have an ironclad plan. All we have to do is stand and look.

Tickets weren’t printed. There isn’t a box office.

And then, yes, there are the hopes and dreams and the determination to take a new path, but for this short space of time, we’re looking at the house of joy.