~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
The soybeans, ready for harvest,
have turned the fields to gold.
I count myself lucky to see them,
glowing like this, from across the lake.
By the next time I stand in this place
they will be gone, and the foliage
on the lake’s bank faded. But today,
here it is, a sweep of color, everything
dancing to the autumn song
of the endless unfolding Yes.
Your first inkling, I suppose,
was a tingling and, a warmth, followed
by an irrepressible urge: Move. Reach.
I imagine your bursting through, the moment
you found yourself enveloped in light.
And still, the urge remaining, intensified
somehow: Move. Reach.
Then the long struggle: cold, heat, drought,
rain, wind and absolute stillness.
And through it all the light returning
with its irresistible song, drawing
your face to turn in its direction.
Mornings of dew and birdsong.
Nights of stars and the traveling moon.
Reach. Move. And now, the fullness,
your great work revealed, these brilliant
petals, this storehouse of seeds
standing as a record of your journey,
and as your crown.
When the world seems to be
falling all around you, get
to higher ground. A new
point of view can change
everything. Where obstacles
stood, spaces occur.
Pathways appear.
Signs emerge to point you
in the right direction.
Release your confusion.
See that it’s all quite wondrous
after all.
When you want a taste of peace,
this is a place you can come, this place
where the tall ones rise from the earth
and tower toward the sky.
Stand among them and be still;
stillness is their first gift to you.
Feel how you are rooted in the earth
and formed from it. Breathe in
the light and the moist, warm air.
Notice the dance of the life force
through your veins and the music
of its movement. Notice
how it is not contained within you,
but flows with your breath, carrying
your essence outward into the air
to dance with the essences of grass
and flowers, trees, and ants and birds,
your note forming part of the song.
Watch the trees allow their leaves
to color and fall, the seasons
to change, time to flow. Hear
them breathing the Yes.
Taste its essence in the air,
flowing into you, and through you,
beyond the farthest edge of time.
I’ve taken the time, these last few days of summer,
to visit my favorite haunts, the beloved
and familiar places, to bid the season farewell.
The trail through the woods is lined with gold
and trimmed with bits of crimson. The first
fallen leaves crunch beneath my boots. Still,
the green prevails and shocks of goldenrod
continue to hold the sun. The earth feels hungry
and eager, as if the first scattering of leaves
has whetted its appetite for the great feast
about to come. In the warm air, a fragrance
unique to autumn drifts leisurely by.
A squirrel sits on a stump munching
on a pine cone. A hawk soars overhead
as high as the clouds heaped in the sky.
It’s a perfect moment, a jewel of transitioning
seasons. I touch the leathery green skin
of an oak leaf, whispering to this last day
of summer my heartfelt thanks and farewell.
We live in stressful times, in a stressful, conflicted world. But the most significant part of that reality is contained in the first two words you just read—“We live.”
The quality of our lives, although impacted by external events, isn’t determined by them. How much goodness, and beauty, and truth we experience in our lives depends on how open we are to recognizing them and to creating them in our individual lives.
Happiness opens us to seeing broader vistas. But it’s not only we ourselves who are enriched by allowing more happiness into our lives. Happiness is contagious.
Happiness radiates out from us and affects everyone we encounter. It wakes people up. It encourages them. It makes them feel connected and validated.
Each person who finds happiness in life moves the whole world in a more positive direction.
Over the past nine weeks, we visited each of the nine choices that happy people make in their lives. Looking at them together, we can see that each of the choices supports and builds the others.
What all nine choices have in common, is that all of them are rooted in the awareness that the choice is ours to make.
1. The first one is intention, a commitment to allow more authentic happiness into your life. This is the central choice around which all the others revolve.
Happy people begin their days by recalling their intention to find the juice in every situation the day brings. They imagine their plans unfolding well and benefiting everyone concerned. They expect happy outcomes.
2. The second choice, accountability, is a commitment happy people make to choose from all the viewpoints and alternatives available throughout the day the ones that are most in harmony with their genuine needs and desires.
In order to build more happiness into their lives, happy people make a choice to recognize for themselves what brings them joy, or pleasure, or satisfaction, or a feeling of well-being and peace.
3. Happy people work at noticing and naming for themselves what enriches them. Identifying the kinds of things that uplift you lets you know where to invest your energy and time.
4. The fourth choice, centrality, is a choice to make the things that enrich you central to your life.
You commit to giving those things priority over activities that hold lesser value for you. You learn to say no to the things that don’t matter in order to say yes to your honest desires.
5. Recasting is the choice to find new paths to happiness when your life is struck by misfortune. It’s remembering that you and you alone are accountable for your happiness. You determine to recast your attention toward positive possibilities regardless of the setbacks that life sometimes brings.
6. Happy people keep their options open. They look for alternative ways to create a sense of well-being or to achieve an important end when their original plans are blocked. They adopt the attitude that when there’s a will, there’s a way. They look for opportunities, or create them.
7. Happy people choose appreciation as a primary orientation toward life. They actively look for, and express, things to appreciate in their circumstances and in others—even those times or people who seem difficult or distasteful.
They look for qualities to appreciate in the current moment, in their surroundings, in their activities, in the company at hand.
8. Because they’re appreciative of the people, things, and events in their lives, happy people are giving. They share their talents and strengths, their wisdom and knowledge, their time, energy, goods, and money freely, with a sense of gladness, from the core of happiness in their hearts.
9. Finally, happy people unfailingly choose truthfulness as a fundamental guiding force in their lives. Knowing that truthfulness is the foundation for genuine intimacy with others—as well as for genuine personal authenticity—they choose to be honest and to live with integrity.
Few of us make all of these choices consistently. We all have our off days, our stretches of darkness. But as with all ways of being, we get better at what we practice. Practicing the choices for happiness allows them to come more and more freely and naturally all the time.
The key is being honest with yourself about wanting greater ease and contentment in your life and then making a real commitment to allow it. That commitment means you remind yourself every day that you are by nature happy, that you intend to let happiness play a central part in your life from now on.
Then you make the choices that foster happiness. For your own sake, and because your happiness makes the world a better place.
Wishing you a week of happy choices. Beginning right here, right now.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Pexels from Pixabay
Let us sing now the ripening of corn,
primeval source of our sustenance,
earth become fruit to nurture her children,
colored with her ores, her soils, her sands.
Let us sing now with our ancestors
the ancient song of praise,
the great chant of thanksgiving
for the ripening, once more, of the corn.
Summer is packing her bags now,
saying her farewells, lowering the lights,
gathering her greens, ushering the last
of the songbirds toward the southern horizon.
At night, as she sleeps, autumn tiptoes in,
and smiling at all that she has done,
kisses her forehead and breathes
over the land to bless her going.
Autumn whispers in, dips her brush
in the gold of the afternoon sun,
and paints swaths of the bean field with its hue.
From the field’s far corner, a single maple
flashes crimson hints of things to come
through air alive with cricket song
and the distant cries of migrating geese
heading south.
Sometimes, when I stop to look, the beauty
that surrounds me is almost more I can bear.
Take, for example, these wild asters,
strewn in such abundance at the edges
of the field that their very numbers
make them seem commonplace.
And yet, what subtle hues their tiny petals wear;
how ornate their decorated centers,
how perfect the choreography of their opening,
one by one by one, until the entire pathway
sings with their delicate song.
Oh, again I say, please, let me never
take such gifts for granted.