Twin Sisters Joy and Sorrow

Two sisters, Joy and Sorrow, lived on a grassy hill outside Dublin. They lived on that hill since they were born, which was the beginning of time itself. Joy and Sorrow did not get along very well. Sorrow was always wailing and sitting with her head in her hands, and Joy was always dancing and singing and playing the flute really loud.

They didn’t understand each other. One day, when the rains came, as they always did in the springtime, Sorrow went inside the little hut where they kept their food stores. Joy, on the other hand, stretched out her arms and drank in the raindrops as if they were drops of nectar from the gods.

Inside the hut, Sorrow decided that she’d had enough of living with Joy. She began to dig a cave in the mud floor of the hut, so that she could live apart from her dear sister. It took her seven days and seven nights – exactly the length of time that Joy spent dancing in the rain and drinking it like nectar.

When Sorrow’s cave was big enough to sleep in, she got some shafts of wheat from the little hut, and spread them out on the mud floor and went to sleep. She slept for a long time. Perhaps it was seven days, or it could have been seven years or even seven centuries. During that time, she had many dreams.

She saw Joy, her sister, dancing in the rays of the sun, wrapping the rays around and around herself, until they became an exquisite golden blanket. She saw Joy spread the blanket out on the ground and lay under the starlit sky. She saw Joy spinning moonlight with her finger, until it became a silver glass goblet, and the goblet collected dew all night long for Joy’s morning tea.

Then her dreams went blank, and she slept dreamlessly until the stars shifted their positions in the sky, and in the waking world, Joy became aware that something fundamental had changed.

When Sorrow began to dream again, she saw Joy weeping. She’d never seen Joy weeping. She seemed to be preparing for a funeral. She was wrapping a body delicately in the golden blanket. She strained to see who it was, though she could not. She saw Joy dipping her fingers into the silver goblet and spreading oil on the body’s head.

With this last dream, Sorrow woke up. And yet everything was so strange. She was not sure if she had woken up in a dream or if she had woken up to her life on the grassy hill. The blanket was her first clue. The golden blanket of sunlight she had seen in her dream was wrapped around her, and she was very warm and snug, when she remembered the cave being cold and damp. When she saw the silver moon goblet by her head, she turned quickly to look for Joy, and there she was, bending toward Sorrow from where she sat by her side, tears pouring down her face like rain from an April cloudburst.

She bent down and held Sorrow’s face in her hands, and with the touch of Joy’s hands, Sorrow felt a surge of energy within her. It felt odd, as if her heart was turning into bubbles and coming up into her throat. What came out was a laugh, so hearty that Joy, too, began to laugh through her tears. At that moment, Sorrow saw that Joy had been weeping for her – that it was Sorrow’s funeral she was preparing. This moved her so deeply that she also began to weep, though she was still laughing at the same time.

From that day forward, the sisters didn’t know which one of them was Joy and which was Sorrow. They knew they were the same.

And this is why when people laugh a good long time, they sometimes begin to cry. And this is why when people cry a good long time, they sometimes begin to laugh.