High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Relief’

It was one of those late July days when the heat came straight from the sky’s oven, full of steamy humidity and heavy as lead.  Not a leaf was stirring.  Even the hardiest weeds drooped in thirst.

Warnings came on the hour: take care of the very old, the very young.  Watch for signs of heat exhaustion.  Go to a shelter or to the mall if you needed relief.

My 200 year old home is shaded by giant pines and built into the side of wooded hill.  Usually it is much cooler than the summer air outside.  But today even its coolest rooms were uncomfortably hot and damp.

Tink, my normally playful cat, searched for a cool surface, and settling for the dining room table top, stretched out for a day-long nap.  I drank a gallon of iced sun tea as I did my household tasks and ran my fans at full speed.

Finally, just before the sun set with a hard red glare in its white hot sky, a wind came, and with it fast, thick clouds the color of charcoal.  Tink and I walked out to the yard and I stood for awhile drinking it in, watching the trees dance, smelling the fragrance of imminent rain.  Tink took off to chase fireflies.

What a glad relief the rain brought!  What pleasure we find in such simple things!

I sliced a freshly picked tomato and cucumber for an evening treat and watched lightning play in the sky as I ate them, feeling happy, and blessed, and content.

Tomorrow’s sun will bring another scorching day.  But tonight, my neighbors and I will sleep in comfort and peace.

Beneath all the intensity and turbulence of life, peace stretches its calm knowing.  It swallows up our hurts and wraps our wounds in its largeness.  It dissolves our anxiety and fears in its luminous, infinite glow.

It comes with the softness of morning, with the melody of a quietly babbling brook, to sooth and refresh and renew us.

And all we have to do to feel its might is to quietly breathe and let go.

Shhhhhhh.  Listen.  With a sigh of relief, an opening of the hand and the heart it comes, quietly singing, “All is well; let it be.”

There didn’t have to be beauty.  A little wave of pleasure now and then would probably have been enough to keep things moving in the right direction.  You know, a little relief from the dullness and drudgery, the anxiety and stress.  A little bit of comfort, a tickle, a taste might have been all that was necessary.

But the world is strewn with beauty nevertheless.  Every corner of it.  It comes in endless hues and shapes and shades.

There didn’t have to be awe, or savoring, or exultation.  We probably could have moved forward with no bigger carrot than a hot, cooked meal and a warm, dry bed.

And yet wonder strikes us now and then so deeply that it takes our breath away.

Why should there be splendor?  Or tenderness enough to make our eyes well with tears?
Why symphonies?  Why poetry?  Why dance?

Why are we so moved by goodness?  Why do we yearn for truth?  What is this mystery in which we find ourselves?  And why do we seek to understand it?

Why is it at once so simple, and so grand?  And why do we feel such gratitude for the very fact of our being, and such deep, abiding joy?