High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Clarity’

It’s all a walk in the park, life.  The rest’s a cloud made from the dust we kick up along the way, reflecting the sunlight and shadows.

The earth beneath your feet, the trees, the sky above are real enough.  We all agree on that.  It’s the stuff that’s up for grabs that’s make-believe.

Let it all go.   When you rise above the dust, it all becomes clear–and infinitely beautiful.

The air was thick, like a mind crowded with thoughts and unable to find its center.  Even the most delicate leaves on the trees didn’t move.

Above us, dingy clouds as heavy as wet bath towels hid the sky and dimmed the light.  It was all you could do to breathe.

It might have felt oppressive.  But the air seemed to be holding a promise of some kind and the utter stillness of everything made you think the earth was holding its breath in anticipation.

An hour passed like this.  We couldn’t help but keep watch.

Finally, from the northwest, in rolled the thunder, tumbling over the hills and across the valley.  You could hear the wind, too, setting the trees to dancing as it swept nearer and neaer.

Then came the rain, pouring like mana from heaven, cleaning the air, letting us breathe again.  And in the clarity that followed, we saw that the center was right before us all along.

A change of pace, a break in the routine, a good stretch, a brisk walk, a nap, twenty minutes of meditation—what renewal a rest can bring!   The mind needs an island of space every now and then, a mental vacation, just to be, to relax, to unwind, to play.

When you feed your mind with little getaways from life’s stresses and demands, you free it to return to its wide, spacious realms.   There, all the pieces fall into place, new possibilities emerge, new perspectives take shape.

Then, when you call it back into service, asking it to focus once more on the business at hand, it comes to you refreshed and paints the sky of your awareness with sweet clarity on your situations.

So, have you freed your mind today?  Oh!  I think you have!  You’re gazing at a summer field where life is rich and green, and reading these words at High on Happiness.   Good for you!

Remember, it’s here for you any time, wrapped in love.  Because you matter.

In legend, the hawk, recognizing the sacred light that poured from the wildflower’s center, drank its nectar and received the gift of clear vision.

The clarity was so deep that it extended far beyond the physical plane into the center of truth, and so the hawk became a scared bird, known for its ability to see and to guide, and the flower was named hawkweed in its honor.

I have seen the hawk soar upward on great invisible currents and disappear into the heart of the sun.  I have seen the heart of the sun in the center of the flower that bears the hawk’s name.

Sometimes legends tell more truth than we, with all our science, can grasp.  We walk among deep mystery.  Reverence is the key.

Here in this lovely mid-winter now, in this earth-breath where the stream flows open beneath the rusty spent leaves of the young oak, where white sycamores reach to the sky, and the snow lies in rounded mounds above the singing winters, I find reason enough to keep on.

Here, in this vast lonely landscape, with my boots kicking up powdered diamonds and wee birds chirping in the trees, I watch the play of light and shadow and need nothing more.

The slow melodious rhythm of it all wraps me in its wisdom; the clarity of its light heals my heart.  Here in this lovely singing now, in this perfect moment, peace dances glorious and free, even though it is winter.

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Strip away all the distractions, the noise.  Pare things back.  Find the essence.

Clarify.  Get down to the kernel, the central truth of things.  Focus on their harmony and rhythm and grace.

Set aside your theories and stories, the things you think you know, the names and classifications, the memories and judgments, your ideas of how things should go.

Just look at the one true thing there before you, singing in its wholeness.

Look at it as if it were brand new, as if you were, coming upon it for the very first time.

Find its message.  Find its beauty.  Find its truth.

Here in this cup of a valley, the afternoon light falls as softly as snow.  Look how tenderly it wraps itself around each twig, each crystalline flake, even those in the shadows.  Look how it beams, golden as a promise, from the hillside.

In the invisible air, silent waves rush from the towers, crowded with the day’s mad memes.

You would think with all those tongues wagging, one would speak a syllable of peace here and there, utter a word of clarity.  They’re few and far between.

But here in the valley, the soft light falls.

Birds huddle like balls of wool in the trees’ branches, hidden, their songs rolling inside them, keeping them warm.

Tracks from the feet of small animals dot the snow with their round designs.  Deer snuggle in nests made of grasses.

Here, at least, is clarity.  Here, peace finds a refuge in the light.  And here I stand, my heart filled with thanksgiving, bathed in serenity, knowing that, beneath the tumult, all is well and each of us is known, every molecule of us, and understood, and loved.

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“Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.  Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.” ~Hans Margolius

The deeper your contentment, the calmer your mind.  The calmer your mind, the clearer your perception.  The clearer your perception, the more beauty you see.  The more beauty you see, the more ecstasy you feel.

Seek contentment.

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One of the gifts that happiness brings is clarity of vision.  Like a weather high, it clears away the clouds and lets the sun shine through.  It restores your perspective and renews you vision, allowing you to see the possibilities that fogs of doubt or mists of fear obscured.

The clarity of happiness brings simplicity to situations that seemed ambiguous.  It broadens your view and lets you see your circumstances with a new lucidity and wholeness—to see the shape of the forest, as the proverb goes, and not just a thicket of trees.  It allows you to see a greater range of choices and to make decisions from a vantage point of optimism.

It comes when you release the pressures that were keeping your lows in place, when you relax and allow them to pass you by.  And that’s the key.  Relax and release.  Let go of your battles and resistance; just relax and release, and let the pressures flow past.  On the other side of them, just waiting to waft in, is a happiness front, full of clear skies.

One day, when I was about five years old, my mother said she couldn’t kiss me goodnight because so many toys lay scattered on the floor of my room that she couldn’t walk across it to get to my bed.  “Why sure you can!” I said.  “Look.  You can step there, and there, and then there.”  She laughed, and I got my kiss.

My mother’s untiring efforts to instill tidiness as a virtue took decades to bear fruit.  Not that I was totally disorganized.  Mom’s standards (and good example) did leave their mark to a certain degree.  But for most of my life, my organizational style was, as a neat-freak friend of mine so tactually said, “casual.”

Over the course of the past few years, though, things have changed.  Mostly, without my notice.  I started working as a secretary for a string of busy executives in some demanding, fast-paced environments.  Supporting them meant being able to locate papers and files and bits of data at a moment’s notice.  Just knowing which of many two-foot deep piles they were in wouldn’t cut it.  It also meant keeping track of deadlines and knowing what had to be done to meet them.  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” was my mom’s rule.  I put it to work.  I developed and then fine-tuned systems.  And now I’m very good at what I do.

But there was a hidden bonus to the organization I did at work.  It spilled over to my home life.  Little by little, clutter disappeared.  I am, I confess, still beleaguered by what I call “the perpetual paper pile.”  But even that has retreated from the countertops and tables to file cabinets and one little corner of my desk.  And my tolerance for its height has a definite limit.

What I’ve learned is that having my belongings and papers and schedules arranged in an orderly way is not only a huge time-saver and visually more pleasant, but it makes for a clearer mind as well.  When my line of sight isn’t interrupted by clutter, my thoughts are more clutter-free, too.  I’m not distracted – in either my physical or mental worlds – by having to dig through the same old bits of stuff over and over to put my finger on just the resource or tool or idea I want.  I can locate it instantly.

I grew up thinking that tidiness was a moral issue.  Keeping things orderly, I thought, was one of the things you had to do to be good.  Now I’ve learned that you do it to be relaxed and free.

I finally got Mom’s message.  She would be proud.