Introduction
Presence and Joy: follows both words back to their roots to find your sense of I AM, here, in this moment.
Presence comes from the Latin for being positioned, existence facing something — which means the present moment is not somewhere you travel to but the one place you have never left.
Joy has a different history from happiness: where happiness began as luck, a matter of how things happen to fall, joy was born from within from the start. A verb before it was ever a state. Gladness that holds its ground when circumstance does not.
Together they turn the personal question or orientation away from what you chase and toward what moves toward you.
So I ask it again, and let the roots answer: Where am I? I am. Here.
Two Words Born Where You Are
The question of personal orientation is: Where Am I?
Two answers arrive.
The first is I AM.
The second is Here, in this moment.
Presence is the whole conversation between these two answers.
Presence is being aware of yourself in this moment.
And the statement I am is a statement of that awareness of you being.
Presence Is Being, Positioned
The word itself has been carrying this teaching all along. Presence comes from the Latin praeesse, to be before: prae, before, in front of, plus esse, to be. Being, plus a preposition. Not just existing, but existing positioned. At hand. In front of. Facing.
The same verb, pointed away, gives absence. The same verb, standing alone, gives essence. And time's version of the word is the present: the now, the moment that stands before you. The only moment in whose presence you stand. Past and future are the absent ones.
For centuries, presence was a field you entered. One was admitted to the presence of a king. Then the word's history bent inward, and the energy moved inside the person: she has presence. The word traveled from a chamber you were allowed into, to a quality you carry, and the root never moved. Presence is existence facing something.
Which means presence is not a skill waiting at the end of a practice. There is no distance to cross. The present moment is not somewhere you get to. The present moment is the one place you have never left.
The Pilgrimage in Place
There is an old instruction that shows up in tradition after tradition: Go into the forest. Go to the top of the mountain. Take the pilgrimage.
A pilgrimage looks like travel, and on the surface a pilgrimage is travel. But consider what the travel is about. The motion through space and time is helping you go deeper into who you are. The walking, the weather, the terrain, the sheer strangeness of being far from your ordinary life: something in all of that turns your attention, at least for a moment, from outside to inside. The turning is the pilgrimage. Everything else is scenery.
So the pilgrimage happens in place, even when the body is physically moving. One goes to the forest to be gathered up in place. The forest is where you stop being the one going somewhere and become the one being gathered.
Meditation, mantra, prayer: in their essential forms, all of them are about how you come to yourself. Institutionalized, they shift into instructions for arriving somewhere else, one more achievement with a required behavior attached. In their essential forms they are pilgrimages within.
Joy Was Never a Luck-Word
Happiness began as luck. The hap in happiness is the same hap as in happen and perhaps: what falls to you, how things are going. Happiness spent centuries migrating from the world's hand to the heart.
Joy never made that trip, because joy never needed to. Joy entered English already interior, already an experience. There is no stage in the word's history where joy meant fortune, possession, or circumstance. Joy was born inward.
And the root of joy is verbal. The oldest layer of the word is not a state you're in but a thing you do: to rejoice. English keeps the verb alive in rejoice itself, joy in motion. Thus, joy became the name for the gladness that is independent of circumstance. The gladness that persists when things are going badly. Happiness stays tied to how things are going. Joy holds its own ground.
Be happy can be issued as a command, and the command can't be verified, only performed. Joy doesn't answer to command. Joy arrives, welling up from within.
What Moves Toward You
Here is where the two words meet. I AM is not about a path. I AM is about experience, about presence. About what moves toward you instead of what you chase after.
Presence is the standing. Joy is one of the experience that emerges in your presence.
So tonight I ask the question again:
Where am I?
I am. Here.
And instead of reaching after what I'm supposed to chase, I'm giving attention to what moves toward me quickly, easily, and safely.