The Joy We Refuse to Surrender

Across long conversations, WhatsApp threads, coffees stretched into the day, I keep hearing the same pulse beneath different words. People are tired. Tired in their bones. Holding too much while tending to what still asks to grow.

It lands in me, too. Their words mirror something I’ve been carrying quietly—my own tiredness. A kind of cellular fatigue that comes from holding intensity for too long. I feel it in my breath, in my attention, in the spaces I crave but rarely enter. And still, something keeps moving. A thread that wants to be followed. A flicker that keeps returning.

And even so—something else begins to shimmer underneath. A flicker. A breath. A quiet glow that feels like sitting around a fire.

There’s one track I return to again and again—Sitting Around the Fire by Jon Hopkins and East Forest, with Ram Dass speaking through it. It moves through the body like warm water. Atmosphere more than song. Medicine without explanation.

Ram Dass says,"You don’t have to go anywhere. Everything you’re looking for is right here… in your heart."

That line settles into my chest every time. I think of friends. Collaborators. Strangers I’ve only met and who still linger in my system. The ones who carry a lot—and continue to make. Creation becomes the warmth in the room. The clarity inside the fog. A way to stay close to life.

A filmmaker in the outskirts of Paris – writing through his physical pain and exhaustion.

A storyteller in Brooklyn maps futures where love lives in the center of the page.

A chef in Naples translating feelings into flavors creating joyful memories by bringing people together.

Here in Paris, a friend mixes flavors into liquid poetry. 

Each gesture builds warmth. Each act of expression makes a kind of shelter. A place for joy to stretch and breathe.

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, writes that the artist does not direct the world, but receives it. He speaks of the creative process as a way of tuning the instrument—so the signal comes through clearly. “The goal is to allow the world to fit inside you,” he says.

The people I love are doing exactly that. Letting the full texture of this moment move through their bodies and practices—grief, pressure, longing, light. They receive, then shape. They absorb, then offer. Without needing to force meaning, they create room for it to arise.

Joy flows through these acts.

Joy as rhythm.

Joy as coherence.

Joy as intelligence that chooses the body as its passage.

People everywhere are shaping through pressure. Writing through loss and rupture. Dancing through insecurity and uncertainty. Mixing through chaos and pressure.  

Creating with what’s available. 

Words rise through loss and rupture.

Bodies dance inside uncertainty.

Beats stack over the static of chaos.

Creativity gathers what lies within reach—and turns it all into movement, sound, flavor, color.

Each act of making holds memory. Each line, each sip, each word, each movement becomes a thread back to life. Beauty enters the room and changes the air.

In this season, I find myself listening more closely – paying attention to the beauty of creation. 

People who stay in touch with their creative fire carry something steady. A kind of glow. A rhythm others gather around, almost without knowing why.

Maybe this is the invitation: More fire. More color. More flavor. More sound. More time with what brings us home.

Aliveness matters more than certainty. Beauty moves things forward. Joy makes the future possible.

So I take it as an invitation to move toward the thing that stirs. The project that hums beneath my skin. The fragment of story that keeps following me. Letting it rise. Letting it shape me. Let it meet my day.

Joy lives here. We carry it in our hands, our eyes, our voices. We give it away without losing any of it.