The Elemental Compass of Joy
Four Ways We Experience Aliveness and the Forgotten Art of Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves
When my son was a week old we went to dinner at the Olive Garden. New mom, feeling a bit like I was existing in multiple realities simultaneously—the love, the exhaustion, the alienness of my own body… I don’t know that there is anything in my life as indescribable as those first few weeks after bringing a new life into the world. Nothing makes sense on a surface level and everything makes sooo much sense on a deeper level of being.
There are many layers to this story, and I’m sure I’ll write about them all at some point, but my pregnancy was one of the most miraculous times of my life. Not because I wanted a baby with desperate fervor and this was an answer to prayer. Not because I had always envisioned myself as a mom. Not because I got to share the insane privilege of carrying a new life inside me with a partner who helped co-create this little soul. In fact, the deep magic I felt surrounding me during that time was because none of those things were true. It was an unplanned, poorly-timed pregnancy, and my son’s father warned me that if I brought a child of his into the world he would make it his personal mission to make my life a living hell. And yet—for nine impossibly perfect months I lived inside this incredible bubble of cosmic love. I have never felt so protected and cherished by my friends, my family, and the Powers-That-Be. However, once my son was born it was like my connection to the radiance of the universe was unplugged. It was massively disorienting.
But back to the Olive Garden. My parents were there. My 85-year-old grandmother was in town. We were hungry and no one wanted to cook. It was mid-September in the Pacific Northwest and truly beautiful outside. This was the baby’s first outing after coming home from the hospital. A lady from a neighboring table came over to coo at my son and asked how old he was. When I told her, she proceeded to scold me, and my whole family, for bringing him out in public at such a tender age. Did I want him to get sick? My mom had two children, my grandmother had five, but apparently we missed the memo that this time was sacred and we should all be incubating in the safety of our home.
I don’t recall feeling properly reprimanded at the time; I was probably bemused. I do recall my soft-spoken, Norwegian grandmother saying something about judgmental busy-bodies. However, that interaction has stayed with me. And every time I am traveling down a creative path, and considering whether it’s time to share something new, I think about that woman and pause. Is it time? Is it too soon? Is this creation too fragile and does it need some time to acclimate to the world?
Isn’t that incredible? A random woman from 22 years ago is still taking up space in my head! I don’t feel like her voice gets a vote necessarily but it’s just there.
So here I am, exercising my rebellious free will, sharing something new even though it could, I suppose, be too soon.
I am a devoted champion of the human spirit. Always watching, listening, taking notes, and trying to make sense of all the mess and the enchanting mystery of this earth experience. I think it’s been established, but if this post is your entry in my world, I am more than a little infatuated with joy. Gratitude is my default emotion, my fall back. I have trained myself so extensively, I can honestly say gratitude is second nature. But joy? Joy is what I focus on remembering daily. I will occasionally refer to this as cultivating joy, but I have found it is really less of an active conjuring and more of an embodiment state—a true remembering.
Think about small children, the majority of them are innately joyful. Ever notice a blissfully unaware child playing and feel a stab of envy that they are so tapped into their joy? Young children manage to be delighted even when their home life and environment may not seem supportive of that. Society at large works overtime to train joy out of children. By age seven most of them have lost the magic they carried with them from conception into life.
My devotion to having a joy practice has led to me developing all kinds of “joy-noticing tools”. Simple ways to bring awareness to your emotions and train your perception to see more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. I love maps, compasses, guides. And that’s what I’ve been developing. I believe it has the power to alter the way you understand yourself, your energy, and the very specific shape your joy wants to take. Because here’s what I’ve come to understand after a lifetime of being enthralled by joy: studying it, chasing it, losing it, and finding it again in the most unexpected places:
Joy is not one-size-fits-all.
We often talk about joy as though it’s a single frequency, a universal feeling that everyone experiences in essentially the same way and accesses through essentially the same doors. And I think this misunderstanding is quietly responsible for a lot of unnecessary suffering and confusion. If you’re a person whose instinctual joy lives in solitude and deep feeling and you’re following advice designed for someone whose instinctual joy lives in social energy and passionate creating—you will keep doing the “right” things and wondering why they’re not working. You will keep missing yourself.
The Elemental Compass of Joy is my exploration on this issue.
Four elements. Four distinct flavors of joy. One compass to help you find your way home to yourself—whatever weather you’re navigating, whatever season you’re in.
Earth Joy — Joy in Being
Rooted. Present. Grateful for the beauty that surrounds you.
Earth Joy is the quietest of the four and possibly the most underestimated.
It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a creative breakthrough or a rush of inspiration or a surge of passionate aliveness. It settles. It grounds. It shows up in the specific, sensory, gloriously ordinary texture of being alive in a body on a planet that is, if you stop long enough to notice, breathtakingly beautiful.
Earth Joy is the weight of good soil in your hands. The particular quality of morning light through a kitchen window. The satisfaction of a meal made from scratch and eaten slowly. The deep, uncomplicated pleasure of being exactly where you are, wanting nothing more than this.
It is the joy of presence. Not as a spiritual practice you have to work at, but as a natural homecoming. Earth Joy people don’t have to remind themselves to be here. Here is where they live. Here is where they breathe. Here is, for them, enough.
The gift of Earth Joy is an extraordinary capacity for gratitude and groundedness. Earth Joy people are the ones who make you feel safe simply by being in the room. They are anchored in a way that steadies everyone around them.
The shadow—and every element has one—is the risk of stillness becoming stagnation. Of roots becoming walls. Of acceptance moving towards anaesthetization. Of staying so beautifully present in what IS that the pull toward what could be never quite gets answered.
If Earth Joy is your dominant element, you don’t need to be fixed or activated or pushed toward more fire. You need to be honored for the profound and increasingly rare gift of your presence. And occasionally, gently, invited to let a little wind in.
Water Joy — Joy in Feeling
Emotional. Flowing. Open to love, connection, and deep ease.
Water Joy is the most intimate of the four.
It lives in connection, deep, real, unhurried connection. The kind of conversation that goes somewhere unexpected and leaves you feeling more yourself than you did before it started. The feeling of being truly seen by someone. The particular ease of being with people who don’t require you to perform or explain or make yourself smaller.
Water Joy is the lotus rising. The wave that carries you rather than crashes over you. The quiet, flowing, almost mystical quality of life when you are in full emotional openness. Not guarded, not braced, not managing how much of yourself is safe to show. Simply open. Simply feeling. Simply HERE in the full, unedited experience of being human.
Water Joy people feel everything deeply, and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. They are the ones who cry at adverts and feel the emotions in a room before anyone has spoken and know, with a certainty that bypasses logic entirely, when something is wrong with someone they love.
The gift is extraordinary emotional intelligence, depth, and the capacity for a quality of connection most people only glimpse occasionally.
The shadow is the current. Water flows, but sometimes it flows too far, too fast, carrying you into depths that weren’t yours to carry. Water Joy can tip into emotional overwhelm, into absorbing everyone else’s experience at the expense of your own, into a kind of beautiful drowning where the feeling becomes the whole world and the shore feels very far away.
If Water Joy is your dominant element, your practice is learning to feel fully without losing yourself in the feeling. To be the wave, not the wreckage.
Fire Joy — Joy in Creating
Passionate. Alive. Expressing your light and following your inspiration.
Fire Joy is the loudest of the four and she absolutely knows it.
She is the creative surge at 11pm when you should definitely be asleep but the idea is RIGHT THERE and sleep is simply not an option. She is the passion that bypasses caution entirely. The aliveness that arrives when you are making something—anything—from the raw material of your own inspiration and watching it become real in front of you.
Fire Joy is not subtle. She does not wait to be invited. She does not ask whether this is a convenient time. She arrives and she demands expression and she will make you faintly miserable until you give it to her.
She is the red energy of pure creation. The flame that illuminates and warms and occasionally, if you’re not paying attention, burns the whole thing down and starts something entirely new from the ashes. Frequently this turns out to be exactly what was needed.
Fire Joy people are the starters, the makers, the ones with seventeen projects in various states of glorious incompletion. They are magnetic in their enthusiasm, impossible to ignore when they’re in full creative flight, and completely impossible to themselves when the fire goes quiet.
The gift is a generative, contagious, world-shifting creative energy that has the power to move people and change things.
The shadow is the burn. Fire without grounding consumes rather than creates. It chases the next spark before the current one has been fully expressed. It can mistake constant motion for aliveness and forget, somewhere in the beautiful chaos, to actually finish things.
If Fire Joy is your dominant element, your practice is learning to tend the flame rather than just feed it. Slower. Deeper. Let one fire burn all the way down before you light the next.
Air Joy — Joy in Expanding
Free. Curious. Inspired by ideas, beauty, and the endless possibilities.
Air Joy is the one most of you reading this will recognize immediately.
She is the bird soaring on golden winds. The mind that lights up in the middle of a conversation and goes somewhere nobody expected. The person who reads the footnote and then the bibliography and then three entirely unrelated books that somehow, mysteriously, all connect to each other in a way that feels like the universe is leaving breadcrumbs.
Air Joy lives in ideas. In the magnificent, intoxicating, endlessly renewable pleasure of learning something new, connecting dots that weren’t previously connected, following a thread of curiosity wherever it leads without needing to know the destination in advance.
She is the golden energy of infinite potential. The soaring feeling of a mind genuinely engaged with something interesting. The specific delight of realizing that the world is so much larger and stranger and more wonderful than you previously understood, and that you will never, not in a lifetime of devoted attention, run out of things to be fascinated by.
This is, I suspect, where many of you live. Curious, expansive, idea-rich, drawn to philosophy and meaning and the examined life. Comfortable in the abstract. At home in the intangible. The gift is a quality of mind that sees connections others miss, asks questions others don’t think to ask, and brings an infectious aliveness to every conversation and every room.
The shadow—and I say this with enormous love, as someone who lives here too— is that Air Joy can become a very beautiful way of staying slightly above your own life.
Up in the ideas, up in the possibilities, up in the golden winds of infinite potential and just a little bit removed from the actual, specific, sometimes inconvenient experience of being a human person in a body on a Thursday.
Air Joy at her best is expansive and grounding in equal measure. Air Joy at her most shadowed is using the beauty of ideas to avoid the intimacy of actually landing.
If Air Joy is your dominant element your practice is occasionally coming down from the sky. Feeling the ground under your feet. Letting the idea become an action.
I have been dancing in the shadows of Air Joy AND Earth Joy. Blissfully and wholeheartedly stagnate… without even realizing it.
You Are Not Just One Element
Here’s what the compass is not: a box.
You are not exclusively Air or entirely Water or purely Fire. You are a combination—a weather system, really—with a dominant element that colors everything and secondary elements that show up depending on the season, the circumstances, the particular chapter of life you’re navigating.
I live comfortably in Air, Earth, and Water with a reaching, longing, sometimes neglected Fire. I float in ideas and swim in feeling and occasionally forget, completely, to let my hair down and CREATE something just for the wild, crackling joy of it.
Recognizing this about yourself is not a diagnosis. It’s a map.
It tells you where you naturally thrive and where you tend to drift. It tells you which joy practices will feel like coming home and which will feel like deliberate medicine: necessary, nourishing, slightly uncomfortable in the way that growth always is.
It tells you, when you’re feeling inexplicably flat or stuck or disconnected from yourself, which element you’ve been neglecting and what she might need from you today.
A walk in the woods for your Earth. A real conversation for your Water. A creative act, however small, for your Fire. A rabbit hole, a beautiful book, a question worth chasing for your Air.
This is the compass. Use it to find your way home.
I leave you with this.
Which element are you reaching for right now?
Not which one you live in most naturally—you probably already know that. But which one is pulling at you, asking for attention, quietly suggesting that she’s been waiting?
That longing is not random. It is, as always, information.
oh yes someone said the j word