Happiness Happens

One day, sixty years ago, in a bedroom in an East coast house no longer standing, my sister woke up giggling. She had dreamed about an orange, she said, and the color made her glad. My sister was like that. A note of music, a lick of lemon ice, a glint of fireflies in the park…these were just fleeting things within a troubling and complex picture…but she let them wash over her, she let them make her smile. She and I had our own invented words that we simply liked the sound of; we spoke them like an incantation, and we laughed. When my father took us for a twilight drive, we leaned back in the car, watching a stream of treetops and streetlights gliding by in the sky, enjoying the procession, feeling safe. And if necessary, my sister had the power to summon up orange, that silly bright color, and be happy.

I have some power too. Yesterday I stood outside a bus station for a few minutes as we waited for a friend, and I noticed a fringe of grass along a curb, trembling in the wind, and I keyed into it. It was like hearing one’s native language in a foreign city, familiar and reassuring. I watched, feeling grounded, feeling pleased. It’s something I do, my own little power. Maybe it’s just a knack I have, or a default inclination. But it helps.

Earlier, we had encountered a neighbor pedaling his bicycle up the canyon, exhilarated and sweaty. It’s hard riding; I remember it well. But he said he had glimpsed a pair of falcons and heard them screeching, and he told us that the world was alive and astonishing, and how good it felt to make his way through the narrow winding corridor between tall grass. He was giddy. I recognized the state he was in.

Oblivious to relevance or chronology, another ancient memory landed in my head. Once upon a time, in the days when New York City still had vacant lots, I peered through a hole in a wooden fence and saw a scruffy abandoned yard where a bird perched on the branch of a small, gnarled tree. Nothing more, nothing less, just a glimpse of an elsewhere happening concurrently but somehow also timeless and within its own parameters, separate from the quotidian urban hubbub. I was a little girl in a big city, but I felt a sense of discovery and delight.

Here, it may be a fragrance that trips me into the zone. Often, it is simply the light. These little spells come over me many times each day, and I’m stoned for an instant, grateful just to be here.

And I pause, as William Stafford would:

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still.

My reign is brief, but I am emperor of morning.

Happiness happens. It comes in small deliveries, out of context, floating away even in the moment of its appearance. Stand still. Don’t question it. Don’t ask more of it.