“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
– Wendell Berry (Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front)
I love this whole, beautiful poem, and I love this one beautiful line. I love it because it highlights a deep truth: joy doesn’t need to be at the whim of other painful realities. Joy doesn’t need to wait for the suffering to go away. Joy can be a thing that makes the suffering itself recede into the background.