Category Archives: Happiness

Idea

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Photo: I'm Having an Idea

Quiet, now, I’m having an idea.

I have a small problem hovering over me, just an itty bitty thing really, more of an irritant, an itch. Okay, it’s a big frustration. It’s that I’m lazy.

I have so many ideas, a few of them even good ones, but I don’t make anything of most of them. They wither and dissipate into dust, dying of neglect. That’s a pity. Not that I don’t get anything done, ever. I’d just like to have a higher win/loss percentage to report.

I’m not likely to become an entirely new and different person, having confessed this; my record of sticking to resolutions isn’t a whole lot better than anybody else’s. But I’ve had my little triumphs, and I do want to expand the list. I’ve made a promise to myself that I will do some things to improve my productivity in a few areas that really matter to me, and I’m going to write down a framework for how to go about it. And I will do it.

I don’t think I will benefit from telling everyone on earth what my plans are; my ability to tolerate the shame and humiliation of failing to live up to my own expectations is long and well-practiced. But I will benefit from keeping the promise. If all goes well, others might even benefit some. (Cheering self onward surreptitiously.)

Invitation to Inspiration

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Photo: Our Sorrows are Our OwnIf Beauty Dwells Inside

If beauty dwells inside the mortal heart

and soul, what dark impediment can be

so strong that we’d forget, incessantly,

to let it rule and be the greater part?

Have bitterness and poverty of care

for good and kindly things the weight and sway

to force the love of beauty out, away,

and leave a wound of emptiness in there?

What fault in us could any cause invent

to trade our greatest gift for grief or hate—

can joy revive, or is it left too late

that we grow wiser, love, create—relent?

Let us let go of emptiness, grow whole

by filling it with Beauty, heart and soul.Photo: Beauty without & within

For Those Whose Happy Place is Too Hard to Find

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Digital illo: A Walk in the ParkYesterday I was ruminating on the foolishness of leaving my mental-vacation hours or days too often unused and under-appreciated. A good night’s sleep is a grand thing and can help stave off the need for more frequent visits to my Happy Place, my Playland, my refuge when I am stuck in place either metaphorically or literally, but it’s not a complete negation of the need. And, unlike many people, I do have such options. I am not so trapped in my suffering, whether virtual or actual, that I can’t dip my toe into the pool of soothing quiet and beauty at least in a pause for meditation once in a while.

What of you who have no such safety zone?

This is no casual question; it’s a matter of sanity and survival, for many. And I am not the person who can cure the disease once and for all. Tragedy can befall anyone; accident, ill-health, loneliness, financial ruin, crime, natural disaster—they’re lurking around ever little corner of life, and some people’s life sojourns seem to take them along the cruelest, most persistently terrible paths imaginable, and I can do nothing whatsoever to stop it. I cannot take away pain, heal wounds of the flesh or the spirit, stop runaway trains, or end wars.

What I can do is small. It’s quiet, it’s incremental, and it comes with no guarantees. I call it, simply, Love. But it can take so many forms, some of them quite unattached to any visible action. It is the true defining factor, for me, of my own versions of a Happy Place, no matter what its current address on earth or in my mind might be. Love, in the form of rest, calm, peace; of hope and anticipation. Of cheery reminiscences and optimistic plans and present contentment.

It’s love in the form of a well-loved song drifting in my inner ear, in the voice of my beloved, on the strings of a celestially fine orchestra, or with the irresistibly danceable beat of the most fabulous band. It’s a violet-scented, cooling breeze in a mossy glade right in the midst of the hottest, sultriest summer ever, or a cup of steaming soup to warm stomach, hands, and mood when I’ve been knocked down by a brutish winter cold. It’s a place where all of my most adored friends and loved ones are gathered around me in a welcome-home hug-fest after a tiring day or week or year—or a candlelit reading chair in an upper room of a place far out in the countryside where nobody can be seen or heard for miles, where I sit and repair my frazzled nerves one poem at a time, uninterrupted.

And for you, you friends of mine who haven’t access to these riches yourselves, I can only give you this: my promise. I promise you that if you will try to build your own place of refuge in your heart, really go deep within yourself and think hard on all of the beauties that you crave most and imagine yourself immersed in them for just a moment, and then for a moment more, I will be here waiting to greet you when you return. With a silent look of recognition that says, Yes, I will be your friend, and I will meet you here again whenever you’re ready. Or with the biggest hug imaginable, if that’s your style. Or with a hot cuppa tea or a cold glass of water and a time sitting together in a peaceful corner while you tell me your story. All of this, in cyberspace, shared because we will it, we imagine it, we mean it.

If you feel like crying, imagine my hand reaching out just as yours does, to wipe the tears off your cheek, and perhaps you will do so yourself with a little more patience and kind detachment that says, Yes, you will be okay. This may not pass, but you will find your way to exist in and through it. Hey, if you need a good rant-and-scream session, I won’t be put out by the noise or cussing when you find a spot safely out of others’ earshot and shout at me until you’re exhausted. I’ll shoulder it from here as best I can, if you promise to let go of it by the end. When you’ve been carrying your burdens for too long—carrying the whole world’s burdens, it seems, forever—it’s okay to say No, to Stop, to grieve over the stress and strain of it all, and to lay those heavy weights down and just let them be. Let yourself be. Know that the world won’t end if you don’t take care of everyone and everything else all of the time, and if it does, it won’t be your problem anymore, either! I understand.

If you need a good laugh, let out a gigantic chortle or just go ahead giggle yourself silly, all the while hearing me joining in on the joke, even if I don’t speak your language, because the language of laughter is universal. Sing softly or at the top of your lungs and I will harmonize perfectly with you, because out here in the ether it doesn’t matter if either of us can carry a tune in real life; in the space we occupy with our hearts, we are perfect singers and know every word of every song ever written.

If what you need is the sleep that eludes you perpetually because of work or pain or fear, take rest in closed eyes and a meditative, purposeful letting-go of all that you cannot solve, fix, or understand as you’d like, if only for a thousandth of a second, and when it has given you that increment of relief, go back for seconds. And thirds. Someday you may sleep again. Spend the wakeful hours until then building your dream palace or hideaway inside your quieted mind, room by room, foundation to roof, and all of its gardens perfectly tended by invisible angelic beings who plant and shape everything you love best into a picture-perfect park for your delectation alone. May you find sweetness and happiness there enough to carry you to and through all that your life brings. And I will wait for you here, be here when you come for respite again, because you matter.

Playland

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Digital illo from a photo: PlaylandIs there a place that’s truly Playland for you? Where, if you need respite from reality for a while, you can be and let go of all your worries, can stop having to be the designated Grownup, can be rested and at peace—even for just a little while? A place that, if you only think of it with great concentration and meditate on its virtues, you can almost feel yourself there and come away from it renewed?

I have a few of these tucked away in my head, some of them real and some entirely made up from the candy-floss and butterfly eyelashes of my imagination. There are times when it’s almost too much to bear that I can’t be there in the physical world, so dreary or tragic-seeming that I can hardly even allow myself to think of my Playland wishes lest they, too, be tainted by the grim reality around me, but when I finally unclench myself enough to believe it’s okay to retreat to that safe and kindly haven, I find relief and renewal there. When I have resisted too long and at last revisit its splendors, there is always such sweet goodness in the moment of solace found in its fond welcome that I ask myself what you, too, should perhaps ask yourself, if you dare:

Why don’t I visit here more often?

Getting in the Way of Focus

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Digital illo: Getting in My Own Way

As always, the calendar teems with To-Dos and the brain busies itself with what-ifs and irksome things done and not done. End of summer, beginning of the school year, change of work seasons, all push against the calm of normalcy and pester for attention. I get too subdivided and distracted and forget that merely doing what I’m doing is, in fact, Enough.

Good to be reminded that if I let go of yesterday and let tomorrow come when it’s good and ready, I can see a clearer view of where I am, what I’m doing, and who I am meant to be in the midst of it all. Note to self. Yes, that’s Enough.Digital illo: Coming into Focus

It’s Never a Bad Time to…

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…Stop.

Yesterday’s chip on my shoulder or rants in my pants should remain yesterday’s. I did enough whingeing and wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth to give vent to my current irritations with the American political landscape. Resulting, I fear, in my passing the irritants on to everybody else in my wake, for which I am only semi-sorry, as I was selfishly just plain unwilling to keep it bottled up any longer. A quick trip to your Happy Place will undoubtedly remove any of the gunk I splashed on you, and I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me even in my slightly unrepentant state. Wink-wink.

Meanwhile, I will shut up for the moment. Here: I’ll show you one of the photos that I took on our last part of the summer’s expeditions, a view that gave me great pleasure both on the day—our last of travel for the season, it happens—and on seeing it again now, as I’m busy editing the hundreds of shots taken from the start of the summer adventures in June through this photo. I’ll inundate you with more of those later. But now seems like a better time to just bask in a Happy Place of my own and share it with you. Peace.

Photo: Last Evening

On our last evening of 2015 summer travel, the view from our hotel room was a calming respite after a day of deluge. Rain and storms can be a joy, but the sweet promise of a rose-colored evening sky afterward brings a different kind of bliss.

Great Things are Meant to Last

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It’s almost midnight here, but there are a couple of hours left of Mom and Dad’s 59th anniversary back in western Washington state, where they began, and still practice, the fine art of marriage. So before I tuck myself into bed, and because I couldn’t reach them in person to say so the first three times I called, I will take this opportunity to thank them for having had the excellent taste in partners that put them together in the first place, the temerity or mild insanity—or both—to have us kids and keep us, and the strength of will and love and hope to stick together for all of these amazing years. Blessings to you, Mom and Dad, and may whatever comes only strengthen your joy in each other.Photo: Mountaintop Experience

Travel Like a Chipmunk

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Photo: Lolitas

Not the most predictable of sights in Boston. Unless you happen to have a kawaii-Lolita events calendar on your desktop, maybe. But just getting out for a meander might also find you on the heels of a trio of Lolitas. 

The idea of having ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ has appeal. It has many useful applications. A life enhanced by travel needn’t be dominated by such notions, though, or I risk being too fixed, both where I have landed and in my expectations and experiences wherever else I go.

Like most people, I suppose, I find comfort in the familiar, in anticipated pleasures and good things I expect, but—especially when I travel—there’s another sort of wonder and happiness that abounds when I can let go of these supposed needs and just allow life to happen.

From my very first major sans-parents sojourn, the privileged joy of an undergraduate “sophomore sabbatical” of untrammeled European travel with my older sister, I’ve continued to discover the enrichment and the thrilling frissons of serendipity and surprise. Hearing a great performance by a renowned orchestra in a glorious concert hall is well worth saving and planning for, of course, but even its excellence is not more fulfilling and memorable than following an unexpected tune through the byways of a foreign town to find myself joining the local crowd as they cheer on a community parade, marching bands blaring and uninhibited children dancing alongside.

Making the pilgrimage to a must-see historic site with the hundreds of other tourists is often not only worthwhile but sometimes enhanced by the very circus-like atmosphere engendered by the regimented masses. But it can barely compare with, never mind eclipse, the almost clandestine delight of having the ‘inside scoop’ from a city native who directed me to a certain narrow side street to knock on a certain undistinguished door, to borrow from the house’s owner a wonderfully heavy antique iron key that unlocked a creaky gate around yet another corner and let my sister and me into a stone-walled, fog-shrouded, hidden ancient cemetery there. That side-adventure on my first big travel expedition was every bit as gorgeous, astounding, meaningful, and artful as the historic sites on the trip, yet as far as I know, it remains unknown outside of its quiet Irish neighborhood. Making reservations and having tickets for the plan-able parts of that journey were both predictably well worth the time and effort, but a couple of hours spent wandering with my sole travel companion among the storied gravestones in that magnificently green and weedy private burial ground, and then climbing the narrow stone spiral up the tower ruin in that enclosure, peering through the mists out of its mediaeval arrow-slit to catch glimpses of the dark houses outside the walls—that was a sweet afternoon no amount of planning could have bought.

Nowadays, my favorite parts of most travels remain the random and coincidental joys of going down appealing alleys on a whim, following the sensory lures of a wafting scent here, a fugitive melody over there, a flash of color or a movement more felt than seen on my periphery, that can pull me off course in a curious second, redirecting my attentions to livelier things. That’s how I’ve found myself in a cafe kitchen helping the chef pipe his handmade ricotta filling into cannoli while ostensibly just grabbing a bite of supper before a baseball game, or watching the splashy finale of an unadvertised international fireworks competition from a perfectly positioned hotel room balcony; how I ended up discussing the virtues of tuna salad sandwiches with a television actress in an airport security line, stumbling onto and being escorted off of a missile site, standing backstage and meeting Lord Whatsis before the opera, and learning from the groundskeeper at a Victorian-style public garden how he grows weeping mulberry trees from cuttings.

Like the chipmunk that found its way into the building when I was walking up the hallway toward it just the other day, by merely rambling aimlessly in an attempt to get myself oriented in unknown surroundings I sometimes discover I’m right in the middle of a fabulous new treasure-house of wonder.Digital illo from a photo: Intrepid as a Chipmunk

I’m Dying to Know

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Do you dare to think about your own death in reasonable, detached terms? Do you think that’s morbid and grotesque to even consider, or do you find it easy? If you find it easy to contemplate in the abstract, is it because you suffer from depression or are suicidal, or is it simply that you recognize living as an inherently terminal condition?

This is big stuff. Even the clinically depressed are sometimes able to recognize, on those tiny instants of light in the midst of the abysmal dark, that their death, no matter how insignificant and unworthy they may think themselves, will affect others. I know this from experience, and from lots of reading and conversation and observation. I know that even when I was at my lowest—thankfully, not as hideously low as that reached by many, as I know in retrospect—my rational moments told me that no matter how they felt about me, or even if they didn’t notice me at all, when I was alive, everyone who was peripheral to me in any way would have some tidying-up to do after my death. Physical, perhaps, for those to whom body removal and disposal fell, but whatever tiny tasks I was not present to perform anymore would either default to another’s To Do list or leave a gap, incomplete. I realized that I am the butterfly effect, in human form. You are. Every living, breathing being has a space in the universe, a purpose, and however unnoticed in life, has an impact both by living and by dying.

All the same, I feel especially fortunate that in my family, talk about death and dying were far from taboo. It wasn’t all that uncommon to find the dinner table talk veering in that direction, if somebody we knew was unwell or had just died. We didn’t need euphemisms and pussy-footing to protect us from the reality of death. It’s nothing more or less than the inevitable cessation of life, and if we can’t talk about that, we’re stuck dealing with all kinds of petty and logistical nonsense just to get through the process when we’d rather be spending time living and loving each other and getting through the complexities of the occasion with a modicum of grace and humanity.

So my family already knows that I would prefer they donate what they can of my organs or remains to someone who has a better chance of survival and health if I give it to them, or to scientists who can learn how to give future patients that better chance. In fact, the government know this: I’m on the organ-donor registry, should I die unexpectedly or with usable parts intact. My loved ones also know that I’d prefer a minimum of fuss disposing of whatever remains of my physical shell after that, the cheapest and quickest cremation and scattering of my ashes being my top choice. I figure that any Supreme Being capable of inventing the human creature from scratch can easily put me into another, newer shell if and when it’s my turn to exist in any other form, and as for the current body, it’s a good source of recyclable carbon and nutrients to replenish any part of the earth that enjoys a good, tasty meal of ashes, say, my long-loved flowers the irises.

Those close to me also know that I have far less interest in what they do to celebrate or mourn my passing than the still-living will. If the occasion of my death can be used as an excuse for a marvelous concert to raise awareness or funds or mere pleasure for the sake of a musical group, whether my spouse is still alive to conduct or attend such an event or not, that would be lovely. But hey, I’ll still be dead, so y’all can do whatever it is that makes sense to you and I promise I won’t roll in my grave or be a pesky poltergeist or complain in any other way. Still dead, if you didn’t catch my drift.

And that, in fact, is a beautiful thing, and a great comfort to me. I don’t look forward to the actual process of dying or the moment of my death. I’d happily live a long, long life in great health and an approximation of sanity that seems cheery enough to me, before dying for real. But once I do, I feel genuinely confident that none of this worldly stuff will matter to me in the slightest, so as much as I like to “plan” ahead to keep my survivors from any terribly fussy practical matters in the event, I’m not worried. Go ahead and dance on my grave, if there is one. Keep on living. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine. Really.

Digital illo: Mine was a Death's Head

Sorry, Texas!

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I’ve enjoyed these six years of living in north Texas, and I expect to enjoy the next whatever-number of years here, too. But after just returning from a roots tour of sorts in the Pacific Northwest, visiting family and familiar territory where I grew up, I am reminded that the riches of one’s birthplace can have no insuperable competition elsewhere in the universe if one has been as blessed with hometown wealth as I have been. I won’t say much more, because yes, I am happy wherever I find love and landscape enough to keep me contented, but I will leave you with a couple of photos as food for thought on the subject just the same. I suspect you know whereof I speak, no matter where your roots lie.

Photo: Mt. Rainier through the Lupines

Texas Hill Country has its magnificent bluebonnets in proliferation in a good spring season, to be sure, but are they any more exquisite than the carpeting of blue lupines on the flanks of Mt. Rainier in *her* glory?

Photo: Raingardens, Seattle

There aren’t *that* many cities where a mere parking strip is as likely as not to be a fully fledged Raingarden, loaded with a mass of flowers, vegetables and fruit, and xeric plants all exploding with texture and color.

Photo: Seattle Skyline from Puget Sound

A soaring modern skyline, the deep, cold waters of the Sound, and the beach life of leisure scented with fresh-caught fish and chips. Don’t tell me that isn’t pretty fine stuff!