Epiphanies found through movement. I.

Joy requires courage.

The vulnerability necessary to live in joy often requires going beyond our comfort—just as how, in order to dance, one needs to leap beyond the paralytic fear of being ugly or awkward.

Conversely, courage is best nourished by joy. Joyless courage is grim. And struggles in the grim absence of joy often only break the world further.

All the expressions we have of love,
    a word of everchanging meaning,
or of friendship,
or the many manifestions of their welcomings,
    shared movement,
    shared music,
    shared breath,
    shared sweat, and bodies, and life itself,
every invitation of forever, extended or accepted,
every love we let go off
    and the mending after, through which we rebirth ourselves,
every word we dare speak against power,
    especiallly that which silently binds our own souls,
faith—and its rejection when proven to be folly,
and even mathematics, as we conjecture a statement before having proved it,
invite from us acts of courage.

Despite the habituations of cruelty we partake in daily,
Despite the machinations of time,
    that invaluable gift that can never be returned once stolen,
    yet which we surrender in silent complicity,
what renders us human is defined in our choices of courage.

Courage is the battlefield where humanity’s future is decided.
Joy brings both mending after and purpose before.
In our best moments, we are joy seekers
—not just for our own, but for others.

The true currency of our worth is in the joy we create for others.

It is the courage to see ourselves as beautiful that makes us beautiful.

Melih Sener