A welcome letter

Dear stranger,

This is Root of Joy — the root of joy. Please make yourself comfortable.

The intention behind this name is to grow your home and your workspace new roots — those connected to the main root, our inner joy.

That root of joy is different for each one of us: it can be thicker or thinner, it can spread in depth or in width, and it can be tied to entirely different things. Because joy is often a very intimate phenomenon, particular to each of us, it is important to listen carefully to what our intuition tells us in our relationship with our belongings and with everything else around us.

Just as the root itself knows best which substances are good for its plant, so we — whether we are aware of it at this moment or not — know deep inside for every single thing whether it is good for our home and our life, or not. Yet a decision that looks so simple at first is most often too complicated for us: because of too strong a connection with the past, irrational fears of the future, ever more tempting but deceptive advertisements all around us, and because we so often live inside someone else's stories.

That is where I may be able to help.

With me you will learn, besides the practical things, how to listen to, hear and feel the voice — or rather the rumble — of your root of joy. Once you have gathered enough experience on the clutter already around you, you will find that you no longer let things blackmail you emotionally, or enter your home and your life lightly and against your real wishes.

Perhaps the more important experience is the other one: you will also learn to accept and to find joy even in the things you do not currently enjoy sharing your home and life with, but which for some reason have to be part of them.

This is by no means an easy journey, but it is certainly one well worth taking.

Michael Brown once explained the difference between happiness and joy: “Happiness is when you feel happy and good. Joy is when you feel everything, when no one emotion is better than the others.”

Happiness is the sun. Joy is the sun and the rain. We need both, even though at one moment we hate them and at another we adore them. In the course of our work together there is no doubt that the rain will come to visit, but this time we will be ready — with a good book and tea in hand — to welcome it, knowing that this is the only thing the rain wants from us anyway.

If you do need me, I hope you will need me only once. I am here to show you how to choose a direction and set a pace, and then the path is all yours. I will wave you goodbye both happily and sadly — but then again, that is exactly what joy is.

Petra