I’ve been feeling pretty good lately.

I had a good few weeks. I met some interesting people, had a few deep conversations. I danced. I went to the Metropolitan Museum with a friend. And in each of these occasions, I felt myself experiencing a profound sense of appreciation for getting to do these things. I had so much fun. And I feel like there’s more to come.

Yet I have to ask myself, is it okay to feel this way when there’s so much seemingly falling apart? When there’s so much pain and suffering going on? Families being torn apart by ICE in California? Others being starved in the Middle East, bombed in Ukraine — not to mention the war zones that don’t generally make the news, like the ones in Cameroon, Congo, Central African Republic — just to list some that start with C.

Here in America, whether they know it or not, millions are at risk of sinking further into poverty, and 18 million households currently suffer food insecurity. Climate change, topsoil erosion, continuing displacement of indigenous peoples, encroachment of industrial agriculture and mining on remaining rainforest or wetlands. Microplastics and forever chemicals… But more importantly, the actual real-time horror in this very moment experienced by other human beings right now, as I sit here in my happy place, engaged with you — a community I cherish — about the challenges and opportunities that matter to us most.

In the midst of so much unspeakable trauma (actually, quite speakable trauma) is it okay to experience moments of joy and connection, or even mere appreciation for being alive and breathing?

I think so. I think if we’re lucky enough, even privileged enough — and I know that’s a loaded word — to have waded into a warm spot in an otherwise cold ocean of despair, we have to at least let ourselves experience the opening and appreciation that comes with it. For being, as long as it lasts, simply okay.

Providing — and here’s the ethical caveat, I guess — providing it’s the joy of connection to the whole shebang, not the relief of having temporarily disconnected from the way things are, or having strategized some “win.” Sure, achievements are great and all that, and if you’re studied and done well on a test, or succeeded in business, or did some hard work and now get to taste the fruit of that effort, sure. Go for it.

But I’m talking more about the sort of bounty that just shows up. The way the snow just falls and quiets the city. A moment of beauty that simply unfolds for you. The way the essential rightness of nature or pattern of moments line up. An embrace from your lover. A moment of recognition with a friend. A sunset with your dog….less something you have achieved than a gift from the gods. Totally unearned. Undeserved. Bounty.

These kinds of moments — what Christians once understood as “grace,” these moments that engender a heart-opening sense of awe — they shouldn’t be denied their recognition and appreciation. The attendant guilt and shame for such moments of grace is natural. Justified, even. I was the kid on his birthday who felt the only thing appropriate to wish for when blowing out my candles was an end to world hunger. How dare I do anything else? And I’m the same way today whenever something great happens. Even now, writing to you from this safe, air conditioned apartment, with a decent desk chair and you actually reading it. How great is this?

And while it calls to mind the many who aren’t in this position — those who don’t yet have an audience for their expression, or don’t have access to technology, or an education, or food, or their land, or a violence-free day — that’s no reason not to experience the moment we are in right now. Because they’re in this moment, too. How dare we refuse to acknowledge and appreciate the bounty we have, when we have it, in the face of what those without are experiencing?

It’s not like we’re oblivious. Few of us are in danger of aspiring to a…let’s call it a “Mar Lago lifestyle,” where one’s joy is predicated on maintaining the walls of separation between themselves and those they exploit. Smoking cigars with fellow elites and celebrating the very separation they’ve been able to create between their own experience and everyone else’s. Victory or domination over some ‘other,’ whose defeat or inferior position is one’s only measure of success.

No, the joy I’m talking about is the very opposite. Not the joy of triumph or domination, but the joy of feeling connected to everyone and everything else. Not the joy of winning the soccer game, but of operating in wordless harmony with the other members of your team. That collective or at least connected bliss/flow state. It’s not at the expense of others. It requires the others.

But if you, like me, get pangs of guilt or shame whenever you’re feeling really good even during times of collective trauma like this, the first thing to remember is that — at the very least — you are refueling and restoring yourself for the good work. Even a diehard activist or agent of change needs to refill their pranic tank.

There’s a great quote about this from Savage Love columnist and podcaster Dan Savage that circulated earlier this year. “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon, and danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight—because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

So yeah, no matter how bad things are, how many of our teammates are falling every day, we can still spoon at night and take delight in that connection. Even when one member of a family is sick or in pain, they want their caregivers to go out and have fun and metabolize all the frustration and grief. It makes us better able to do service and be present. It reminds us what the “light” even is, so that we can bring it to places it’s dimming or gone.

Joy, awe, sex, dance, art are our ways of metabolizing, processing, composting the anguish — rather than wallowing in it. Like the jazz band at a New Orleans funeral, turning the corner and suddenly shifting from funeral dirge to celebratory upbeat dance catharsis. It’s as if they are processing and transforming the energy, pacing and leading the mourners and the deceased to the next place. “We danced at his funeral” doesn’t mean we hated him, but that we loved him. Still do.

Moreover, we are members of the larger human organism, or the greater organism of the planet, life, or the cosmos itself, so these experiences of bliss or compassion or awe are not ours alone. We’re not just restoring ourselves for the next fight. These are opportunities for us to metabolize the greater trauma, the pain, the confusion, the grief. Or think of it this way: with so much awful shit going on around us, how dare we deny the profound beauty of engaged experience when it is offered to us?

If a tree is dying, or under attack from a parasite, with many of its leaves and branches decaying, what of the leaves at the distant edges of the canopy? The ones that are being bathed in sunlight, and still healthy enough to take that in, photosynthesize, and convert that energy into nourishment for the rest of the tree? Should those leaves cower from the glorious process and undergo respiration in a compromised state of despair, or embrace the good fortune of their circumstance and fully accept the nourishment on behalf of the whole tree?

After all, does the rest of the tree want chlorophyll or glucose or whatever it is, tainted by the tree equivalent of stress hormones, anxiety, and more grief? Or do those suffering parts want the healthiest, joyously transmitted, encouraging signs of life and growth and sustainability from those parts that are healthy? Even if those parts are continuing on without them? When you die someday, it’ll be more important that your kids are truly happy and flourishing than that they have cried sufficiently for you. That’s what will help you pass on.

But I digress.

I thought about all this when I was at the museum with a friend the other day. We were at the Metropolitan Museum’s new wing with art from Africa, the ancient Americas, and the Pacific. And the whole experience was transcendent. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It was somatic, embodying, grounding. Yes, also with the attendant guilt, shame and sadness over how many of these artifacts were removed from the people and places they belonged to — maybe under force.

And all of those factors — the beauty, and the circumstances leading up to that moment — moved me into a really profound experience of appreciation. On the one hand, just to be there in those tremendous spaces, tall ceilings, natural light, and surrounded by other curious humans, even museum guards who wanted nothing more than to help us find what we were looking for and achieve states of wonder. For all its problems — and I’ll get to some of those — this was western civilization at its finest. A pay-what-you-wish public institution that was functioning so well it overflowed.

It was the work itself — or maybe I should call it the play itself — that really got me, though. The way these various peoples expressed their reality, their depiction of the human form and its place in nature. Nothing was pedestaled or separated. Everything was in and of the natural fabric. Not that these people didn’t live lives harder than what most of us can imagine, but they also expressed the innate joy of embodiment, an awareness of the cyclical nature of this reality. There was progress and movement, but not of the kind we understand in an entirely linear culture. Not progress toward some new and improved future away from this moment. It was the progress of iteration, of gaining deeper knowledge of what is, and learning how to relate to and exchange energy with everything else - rather than trying to tame or dominate it.

Artifact after artifact, each one emanating the innate, assumed joy of being part of this sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic dance.

Occasionally I’d peer past an archway to a neighboring gallery of Greek or Roman statues. And nothing against the ancient Greeks or our own civilizational path, but I felt pretty repelled by the work. They had more objectified anatomical accuracy, for sure. But it was almost like a contest to see who could best identify and perfectly represent an idealized human form while simultaneously maintaining perfect verisimilitude. A bit like an expensive Marvel movie special effect or an AI avatar deep fake. Impossibly hyper-real. And the forms themselves were pedestaled. To be admired up there for their ability to rise from earthly matter into pure models of idealized beauty, rendered in perfectly objectified detail.

Yet they were quite dead. For all their accuracy and verisimilitude — like a Gray’s Anatomy of the gods — they had lost the plot. In their effort to perfect the human form distinct from nature, they ended up sacrificing the living essence of their subjects for these objectified ideals. As different from the flesh and soul as written words are from human speech or, even better, as an email summary is from grunts and moans.

And one gallery further on from that, was all the European Jesus stuff. Jesus himself aside, the art and representations curated for that particular gallery were about darkness, and pain, and suffering. Perpetual sorrow. Why have you forsaken me? And at that moment, I felt, life is hard enough. I’m going back to the fecund, regenerative, celebration of love and life and death and rebirth. That’s what I need right now as I watch my civilization finally bear the karmic returns on centuries of war, slavery, and domination, and slowly wake up to the truth that we’ve been on a misguided mission to escape from the very source of all joy and flourishing.

Finding a pocket of bliss along the way, even in the most dire of circumstances, is not just a privilege but an obligation. It’s the path to reconnecting ourselves and everyone to the world we’ve been trying and failing to control. Your deep sense of rightness, grounding, and flow is not an indulgence but a compass.

Joseph Campbell got labeled a feckless New Ager for summing up this common wisdom as “follow your bliss.” Aleister Crowley tried to express it as “do what thou wilt.” Ram Dass told us to “be here now,” which would of course include the moments of joy.

And I get it. It sounds and feels selfish. Follow your bliss? What if our bliss is some sort of cannibalistic Yellow Jackets moment, feasting on the flesh and pain of another. And in some cases, truth be told, it kinda is. Gotta eat. Gotta cut down a tree. Gotta take in order to live. Well, at least we can make like Hiawatha and thank the tree for offering its wood for our canoe, and the bird for contributing its body to our metabolism. If we just do it consciously, we’re not taking so much as participating in this whole thing that’s going on in and around us.

The more we appreciate, the less we want to take - the less we need to take. Because the way we’ve learned to take in our society? It has less to do with participating in the great cycles of things than extracting enough extra in order to insulate ourselves from those cycles. We freeze and store and save and invest as admired values, tributes to our ability to become independently wealthy. The more we stuff or value we can extract and isolate from the great swirl of things, the safer we feel. We’d rather pedestal something natural as a goddess we can own or at least worship, rather than a living thing with its own spirit with which we can commingle.

So we have come to equate moments of joy with isolation and selfishness or, worse, the karmic debt for whatever awful thing we must have done - at least indirectly - to have seized that sweet nectar.

But I promise you: if you are really tasting that sweet nectar, appreciating it for all it is, letting it open you to an awareness of the entire chain of being that brought it to you, with the full knowledge that you don’t even own or control it, that it is merely passing through you, using you to transform to some other state? If your experience of bliss is compatible and complementary to this composting and regeneration of everything? It’s more than okay.

By all means: revel in that pocket of joy when you find it. It’s good for everyone, and everything.