Happiness

This morning I was wondering, how is happiness different from other abstract nouns I’ve explored: comfort, joy, or delight? Then I looked up the definition and there they all were: good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy: delighted, pleased, or glad. So luck was in there too.

Though one can be happy about a singular result–a bit of luck, a pleasurable experience, a hummingbird hovering in sunlight–I think happiness as something internalized, attained through acceptance, appreciation and gratitude. Not the kind of happiness found through the rose-colored glasses of denial and ignorance, but through awe, wonder, and curiosity.

The Declaration of Independence declares that we have been endowed by our Creator to pursue happiness, but the men who composed that document would have had very different ideas of happiness than I do, than almost anyone living has today, I would think. And they didn’t say we have the right to attain happiness, to spend every day in happiness, but the right to pursue it. The first definition of pursue at dictionary.com is “to follow in order to overtake, capture, kill, etc.” I hope that’s not what they meant.

Sunday’s experiment with additive text, got me thinking about lettering and generating text, so, I put some letters in the mirrorworld. Starting with an “A” made it clear to me that when the bokeh flips, it flips upside down and backwards.

dVerse Poets Pub

Today’s prompt is to write a food poem. Misky invites us to play with our food and lick our fingers. The prompt made me want to go play in the garden. My favorite meal is one I’ve freshly picked. It brings me so much happiness to grow my food.

The Poem

How My Garden Grows

Impressed by the determined kale’s
waving green leaves that persisted,
refusing to perish through
the long, recurring winter
towering over the weeds,
with my shovel and garden gloves,
I attack and turn the soil, finding
roots and rocks where I had planted
just last year, and also finding
something very strange
a mystery appeared

Every year I dig up old nails
or a little plastic toy
but this I can’t identify
tossing my gloves in the wheelbarrow
filled with fir cones and weeds
I turn it and turn it
inspecting it in every way
careful not to cut my dirty fingers
I think of lighting hitting
a beach, making glass of sand
but this is dirt and no lightning
has struck and it was buried.

At first I feared it was a curse
this dirty, sharp-edged glass
figure, but after cleaning
off its outer coat it brings to mind
a little gardener, laboring
hunched over carrying
a heavy load, a bountiful harvest
what luck to discover
such a good omen
as I begin to sow
maybe his sharp points
will ward off bunnies
and curious dark-eyed
juncos and crows,
leaving those tasty kale leaves
whole to flourish