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By Moonlight, 1994, Margaret Neve
We surrender to joy: we have no option. Margaret Neve’s girl dances in the moonlight, resting upon the silky air as the great moon rests on the soft waters. She throws her arms out wide as if to float backwards, held up by pure joy. This gesture of embrace, opening as widely and welcomingly as is possible, marks the experience. Joy is felt as profoundly ‘right’, as what ‘ought to be’. In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so – that it is fundamentally alien to our being: this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.
