Still Here. Still Shining.

Joy, Collective Grief, and our Quantum Leap

I captured this photo a couple of nights ago… excuse my amateur photographic skills!
A silver-thin crescent Moon in Cancer (trust me, it really was a tiny sliver), with Jupiter in Cancer glowing above her. Venus in Cancer burning soft and steady to the lower-left. Three celestial bodies, holding their own light in the dark. I stood there a long time. A really long time. This holy trinity in Cancer, the sign of emotional depth, intuition, and the sacred feminine, had me mesmerised.

Since my last post a couple of weeks ago The Space She Left, I have been ruminating on something that has been a guiding light to me. Joy never actually leaves. Grief may move in, but Joy doesn’t move out. Ever.

I know. I know that may sound a bit like a bumper sticker. Stick with me.

The Drafts We Keep

This week I read words by Tessa Lena from Tessa Fights Robots, who also just lost her mother. She wrote:

“I can’t believe I will be finishing the articles that I started when she was alive. I remember how I started those drafts planning to finish them when she feels better, and now she has gone home.”

I had to stop reading.

Because I have those drafts too. Half-written things. Projects started in a world that still had Mum in it. And there’s a particular grief in that, isn’t there?

The cursor still blinks. The words still come. Life just keeps going with the breathtaking indifference, and somehow you have to keep writing into it.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about. Tessa is (or will) finish those articles. I am writing this one. We’re both still here, still showing up. And I think that says a lot. The joy that animated those drafts & dreams never leaves.

It’s alive. It’s alive in all of us.

Okay, Let’s Talk About the World for a Minute

I want to zoom out, because the world is a lot at the moment.

We are living through a genuinely discombobulating moment in history. And I don’t say that lightly or for dramatic effect. I mean the pace of change right now is unlike anything most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. I don’t feel I am alone in feeling this. And underneath all of it, I think what a lot of people are actually feeling is grief. Collective, disorienting, “I can’t quite name it but my chest feels heavy” grief.

We are grieving human connection as something artificial is attempting to reshape how we create and relate to each other. We’re watching the meaning of things foundational to our humanity get contested and rewritten in real time.

Women like Sall Grover are standing in the full force of this storm, refusing to let their very existence be redefined out from under them, and that too is a grief story, the grief of watching bedrock become contested ground.

There are a zillion other crazy things happening too.
But I know you know them.
We are living it.

I am also not here to tell you what to think about any of it. Genuinely. I prefer more of a Buckminster Fuller approach through obsolescence.

But I am here to name what I see underneath all of it.
Real, legitimate, agonisingly painful.
Collective Grief.

And yet, what I have come to understand over the years is that Grief and Joy are not opposites. They are companions.

In spiritual traditions, grief itself is understood as evidence of love. And where love exists, joy has to be present. It’s the physics :)

Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet:

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

Grief enlarges the heart. It changes us. It strips away illusion and reveals what is most sacred, precious, and real. Over time, joy through grief begins to feel different… less superficial, more embodied, more reverent. Quieter. Deeper. Truer.

So what is Joy?

Joy is Not the Same as Happiness (This Matters)

Joy is not happiness.

Happiness is circumstantial. Happiness is... things are going well, the sun is out, the coffee is good, there is one piece of chocolate with your name on it, or you haven’t made the mistake of watching the MSM today. And look, I love happiness. I am fully in favour of happiness. But happiness depends on conditions.

Joy is different. Joy is more like a signal that keeps transmitting even when the reception is terrible. It’s the underlying hum of aliveness itself. The breath of the Divine. It’s Grace. It gets buried sometimes. It goes very, very quiet. But it doesn’t switch off, disappear, or leave you. It’s eternal.

When I find Mum in the dew on the She Oaks at the beach... that’s not happiness. It hurts, actually. It’s aching and wild and fierce. But it’s also unmistakably Joy. The same frequency that was both within and between us when she was alive, wearing a different shape now.

And when Tessa opens one of those unfinished drafts and writes the next sentence? Joy. The hard kind. The kind that keeps going anyway. Eternal. Luminous. Pure.

But Here’s Where it Gets Interesting: Love and Joy Are Not the Same Thing Either

They are deeply connected. But they are not the same experience.

Love as humans define it is relational. Joy is existential.

Love is the energy of connection, the heart moving toward someone or something. It involves devotion, tenderness, care, union. It can be fierce or gentle, romantic or maternal, spiritual or achingly human.

Joy is different. Joy is a state of being. The felt experience of aliveness itself.

You can feel joy watching light move across the ocean. Hearing a piece of music that undoes you. Sitting in silence so complete it almost has a sound. Nothing “caused” it in the ordinary sense. Joy arises when we feel connected to life itself, not to any particular thing within it.

Love says: I cherish this.
Joy says: I am alive within this moment.

One of the most beautiful paradoxes is that love can also bring grief. The more deeply we love, the more deeply we may mourn. But Joy still remains underneath all of it, because Joy doesn’t depend on everything staying the same.

Another way of saying this is…

Love is the frequency of unity.
Joy is the natural resonance that arises when we are aligned with that unity.

Love is the river.
Joy is the shimmering vitality flowing through the water.

Love is the heart opening.
Joy is the light that enters through the opening.

The Bit About Quantum Leaps (Bear With Me)

I am jumping across topics here, but trust me. They are all related.

I hope you are not rolling your eyes as I mention our ‘quantum leap into a new earth’. It feels like an overused phrased of late. I get it. Yet I also feel it’s actually the most accurate description of what’s happening. So maybe the overuse is simply the critical mass of people feeling it?

In quantum physics, a quantum jump isn’t gradual. It’s not a slow slide from one state to another. It’s a discontinuous leap, sudden and irreversible, into an entirely new level of organisation. You cannot understand the new state from within the old one. You have to jump first and understand later.

Life on this planet has done it many times before. Major evolutionary transitions. Single cell to multi-cellular is a prime example of a quantum phenomena in biology.

That’s where we are. Individually and collectively. Mid-jump.

The grief is part of the jump, not an obstacle to it. The willingness to actually feel what we need to let go of, to not perform okayness, to let it genuinely crack you open, that’s the mechanism. That’s what creates the new.

This is what grief does when you let it be a teacher. It strips away everything that was never really yours to begin with. The inherited stuff. The performed stuff. The “I’m fine” stuff. And from that stripped-back, bedrock place, something new actually has room to emerge.

I’m seeing it everywhere right now. In the people who are grieving honestly. Who aren’t bypassing. Who are holding their personal losses and the collective losses and saying, out loud: this is hard, and I am still here, and I am paying attention.

One Last Thing

Now back to my photograph…

The crescent moon doesn’t apologise for being so gloriously luminous. She just holds the refracted light. Clearly, steadily, beautifully. The dark around her isn’t a failure. It’s just her context right now.

Jupiter sits above her in Cancer, that great planetary elder, the one that expands everything it touches, and right now it’s touching home, ancestral roots, belonging, the deep emotional bedrock of who we are. As if the cosmos is saying... your wisdom lives in your roots, in your Soul’s evolutionary journey, not in spite of your grief but because of it.

And Venus. Oh, Venus. Soft and unwavering to the lower-left. Love, in Cancer. Love that is tender and protective and refuses to be argued out of its own warmth. Love as a frequency that doesn’t switch off when things get hard.

Three lights.
In the dark.
Not performing.
Not straining.
Just... there.
Shining.

Honestly? That’s the whole article, right there in one photograph.

We are all crescent moons at the moment. Partly in shadow. Carrying grief that is personal and collective and sometimes impossible to name.

Mid-jump into something we can’t fully see yet.
Yet we feel it. We feel it deeply.

And that’s why we continue to show up & shine.

Joy does that ✨

_____

Where are you finding your Joy right now? Inside the grief, the change, the chaos of it all? I really want to know. Drop it in the comments, even if it's small. Especially if it's small, actually.

All my Love & Joy, xx Simone