High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Perception’

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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.

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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” ~Marcel Proust

At last the long work week came to a close. A bank of clouds had blown in during the afternoon, draining the sky of its color, mirroring the way the sleep deficit I had accrued drained me.

I ran through the list of places I could go for my daily photo shoot, but none of them appealed to me.  I wanted just to go home.  “It’s spring,” I told myself flatly.  “You’ll find something in the yard.”

So I let the pressures go, and the work week go, and drove home with music on the radio, dreaming about the nap that waited for me there.

As I pulled in the driveway, a patch of weeds on the hillside caught my eye.  Some kind of small white flowers bobbed on leafy stems in a little clump near its base.  They were kind of non-descript from a distance, ordinary weeds you would pass without giving them a thought.

But when, moments later, I focused my camera’s lens on them, their beauty bathed my awareness.  Atop each stem, dozens of pretty buds snuggled at the base of the perfect four-petaled white flowers, surrounded by slightly blushing deeply toothed leaves.   Each bud would open to become a flower.  And each flower would produce a seed capable of growing into another plant that would produce more blossoms and more seeds.  How remarkable!

The sight washed all my weariness away.  The world was a miraculous place once again.  And all because of a patch of weeds that I could easily have passed by.

It’s all in how you look at things.   The world within us and the world without are strewn with limitless possibilities for discovering new beauty, new wonders, new paths, new interpretations and perceptions.  I was reminded to keep from too quickly dismissing a glimmer on the hillside as a weed.   Often it’s wise to readjust your focus, to take a second look.

“Somewhere,” Carl Sagan once said, “something incredible is waiting to be known.”  And it’s up to us to open ourselves to see it.

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Right this very moment, life is blooming everywhere.   Its shining waves sing themselves through the farthest imaginable edge of all creation, for they are creation, calling forth everything that exists.  And that’s a fact.  (Ask any quantum physicist.)

The only sensible thing to do is to dive right in.  Wallow in its pollen.  Let it splash all over you.

If perception creates, choose to see joy.

Life is a trip.  Get your happiness buzz on.

Beeeeeeeeee!  Wheeeeeee!