High on Happiness

Archive for September, 2010

.

You don’t have to believe in hope, in goodness, in love.  You can chalk it all up to physics if you want to.  (Although that seems a bit of a stretch to me.)

Its okay if you think the perception of beauty is nothing more than a learned response to patterns of stimuli, or that the whole wondrous cosmos (with its spinning galaxies and beating hearts and all) has no consciousness perpetually giving birth to it.

But I have to tell you that when I see salmon chrysanthemums cupping little earth-globes in their centers, something happens inside me that mathematics just can’t explain.

.

.

Even in the rain, some sons shine.  Stars glisten in the dark even when you can’t see them.  There’s always reason to hope.

Over the next hill, around the next bend, right the very next minute, anything could happen.  I say keep your wishes going.  Expect that it’s going to be good.

Who are we to rule out miracles?  Last minute saves?  Why, it happens every day, every minute.  Only a fool gives up.

Want proof?  My old neighbor called me up.  Some folks here say he’s a gruff old dude and hard.  He broke a switch on his washing machine, he said.  (He keeps it in his yard.)  He ripped the lid back too far trying to rescue a small frog that had climbed inside.  “It didn’t mind the water,” he said.  “But I didn’t think the soap would do him any good.”

See? You never can tell.

You think the day is buried in gloom and the leaves on some autumn maples catch your eye.  The phone rings and you hear about a small heroic kindness.

Keep the faith.  Expect that it’s going to be good.  Some sons shine even in the rain.

In the brush by the creek, the colors of the asters catch my eye.  I stand staring at them, at the juxtaposition of their blue against the neighboring red and purple leaves.

How can that happen?  How can every last detail be so perfect in its shade and design?  How can everything change at once, altogether, in total harmony all the time?

Think of it:  The spinning and tilt of the globe around the sun, the response of every living thing to its motion.  Think of the ceaseless adjustment of processes, the countless numbers of them happening at once as day becomes night, as the seasons meld one into another.

This kaleidoscopic now is a living, breathing masterpiece, a perfectly orchestrated dance.  And to think that we are not only alive but conscious within it all and capable of fathoming some of its majesty!

Regardless of the dramas unfolding in our many-storied lives, when you just stop to see the scope and magnificence of the setting where you find yourself, you have to admit that it’s an awesome, sacred place.

Morning comes laughing, pulling you from your cobweb of dreams into the spaciousness of a new day.  “Here,” she says, pouring her light all over your head, “have some freshly brewed hues.  This ought to get you going.”

And all of a sudden, there’s nothing but right now, stunning and bright.

It’s hard to argue with a sunrise.  I mean here she is, dazzling across the whole sky, hauling an entire fresh day of possibilities behind her where you can write anything you please.

Why, you could change your whole life if you wanted.  Who’s to stop you?  Your old stories are no more real than the dreams she just wiped away.

You could push your best wishes out there, roll them right into the minutes, see where they go.

With a sky so full of magic, anything is possible, don’t you think?

As the rays of the late afternoon sun roll silently across the forest floor, they illumine, for one final time, the little clump of wildflowers hidden deep in the woods.

By this time tomorrow, the sun’s path will have rolled a little farther southward.  By this time tomorrow, the wildflower’s last petals will have fallen.

And so this is the wildflower’s last dance, its graceful adieux.

It has no sadness to it.  The cells of the wildflower sense that their essence is changing form, just as it has always done.  But it doesn’t see transition as a loss. The essence takes all it has ever experienced with it as it endlessly changes, growing ever more beautiful and complex as it flows.

It witnesses all that arises around and within it, and revels in its unfolding joy.

And so the small flower is one with happiness as it dances its lovely last dance.  Once, it knows, it was a white wildflower that spent one summer in a Pennsylvania woods.

I saw a movie once about a class of school children who were excited because it was the day when the sun would appear.  It happened, you see, only once in a hundred years on their planet, and then, only for an hour.

Some people lived their entire lives without witnessing the beauty of their world illumined fully by the sun’s light.

To burn off some of their anticipation as they waited for the magical hour, the children played a game something like hide and seek.  One little boy, in the throes of the game, was accidentally locked in a closet.

Then the sun appeared and all the children rushed outside and ran through the fields surrounding the school in absolute wonderment and joy.  All, that is, but the little boy who was locked in the closet and forgotten.

Decades have passed since I saw that film, and I have never quite forgiven the writer of its story line for inventing such a cruel tale.  Just imagining that someone would suffer such a loss broke my heart.

And yet how many of us, locked in closets of our own making, walled in by prisons of our own busy thoughts, walk through the world and never truly see its beauty?

Oh, be mindful and see.  Each moment is once-in-a-lifetime, you know; don’t miss the sun’s shining.

Like everything that breathes, she came into the world with one pure intention.  It swam through her cells and poured through her veins.  She was meant to be, she knew, exactly what she was, and she reveled in it, even though what she was continuously changed.

Unlike the humans who shared her world, she never lost sight of her mission: to drink in the experience of being alive.  She gave herself to it completely.

So clear was her intention, so uncluttered by contradictions or doubts, that every moment seemed fresh and new.  She couldn’t stop paying attention.    She gave herself wholly to every detail: the heat, the cold, the darkness, the light, the pleasure, the pain, and always the ceaseless flow.

Hers was a life unclouded by comparisons or judgments.  All she saw was pristine beauty, everywhere and always, as life danced its flawless dance.

To the people who passed by, she was nothing but a common weed, a splotch of white along the autumn roadside, unworthy of note.  But oh, if they could have heard her soul singing!  If for one moment, they had stopped to look, to really look at her, to see the beauty in her radiant flowers, perhaps the secret of her happiness would have been revealed.  Perhaps she would have whispered to them her immaculate truth: wholly be.

.

What an audacious palette you wield! So gaudy, so rich and bold!  Oh, Autumn, the leaves you brush with your colors are simply giddy with joy.

So it’s the end of summer’s days.  So the winter is coming.  Today Autumn is tap-dancing in, flinging her pigments to the winds.

See?  From here below, the leaves are a stained glass window whose picture says laughter’s the music the glad angels play, and each hue is a note in their song.

They’re like semaphores, bright as parrots’ wings, spelling happiness across the sky.

No wonder the children dance down the streets.  No wonder the lovers hold hands.

.

Just for a split second, everything was perfectly still.  It was like the moment at the theater when the curtain begins to part, just before the orchestra’s first note begins.  You hold your breath in anticipation, peering at the wondrous scene that reveals itself to your eyes.

But this was no stage play.  This was reality, in all its lush, awesome wonder.  Right now I was experiencing a nanosecond of space-time that never existed before, nor would ever come again, and yet contained the whole of all that ever was or will be.

Then the crickets resumed their song and crows cawed overhead, in an overture for autumn.  And I was back in the world of motion where trees danced in the breeze and leaves tumbled from their boughs, and the afternoon’s long shadows swept across the valley.

I breathed the balmy afternoon air, pungent with the fragrance of emerging autumn, and gazed into the depths of the infinite sky, still balancing on the rim of my glimpse of timelessness.  Then I walked across the lawn with its thousand blades of grass and its round leafed clover, and marveled at my cat, up on the hill behind the house, stalking chipmunks.  And I was incredibly glad to be alive.

.

Last week, I was led by serendipity to a poem  that deeply moved me with its simple truth and beauty.

Today, in honor of the day’s solemnity and the need for comfort and uplift it brings, it is my privilege to share that poem with you.

Its author is Beth Atchison, creator of the blog Simply Blessed.  You will find a link to Beth’s blog in the list of “Other Good Stuff” to the right.

.

.

Life Never Fails

by Beth Atchison

I have fallen between the cracks
and landed in the spaces
where love never fails

Beloved, you are my captor
and I am bound by your love

I hear you whisper softly
don’t speak. words fail here, just listen

churning on the seas of your desire
I am the rising and the falling

the beginning and the ending
the fullness and the emptiness

journey to the furthest point of your yearning
I am the anguish and the exaltation

I am the grain of sand awakening the pearl

I am the morsel you are tasting
be it bitter or sweet

quench your deepest thirst here
where you think I’m not

I Am.

Thank you so much, Beth, for sharing.