I reminded myself that I had survived the cold when I went out to feed the chickadees. Besides, this was the first snow of the winter, slight as it was, to hang around for a while, and the sky had patches of blue and all that rare, brilliant sunshine. I relented. And the next thing I knew, there I was, in the pines beside the lake, just passing the nursery and noticing how the sunlight danced on the young ones’ glossy needles. But it was the dazzling light itself that drew me. “Come,” it invited. “Look from here.” I followed the tall shadows it cast on the ground, the snowy spaces between them dazzling in the light, and every inch of the place clear as the crisp air, and singing “Hallelujah!”
I came across a beautiful quote today, from a brilliant Italian architect, engineer and archeologist who lived in the late 1400’s. His name was Fra Giovanni Giocondo, and his counsel about living in happiness rolls across six centuries to us today.
“I am your friend,” he said, “and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.”
Think about that. “No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today.” There is no other life but the one unfolding around us right now. And this life, this moment–if we look into it deeply enough, if we are awake and fully present within it, and sense how far it extends–holds everything: All beauty; all grace; all goodness; all truth. Right here, right now, perfection abounds.
“No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.” All that hides peace is our warring against what is, our wanting it to be otherwise. The moment we exchange our warring and wanting for acceptance, peace descends.
The faults we perceive, in ourselves, in each other, in the world, truly are but shadows. And it is we ourselves who cast them, with our storyboard judgments and beliefs. But once we learn to set aside our criticism and our theories about how things ought to be, and to open our hearts instead, seeing what is before us with clarity and love, the light of joy shines through.
And it’s all right there, within you, within me, within us all, for the taking. Take heaven. Take peace. Take joy.
Fairies dance here. I hear their silver laughter pealing in the morning as they raise these leaves— much the way you’d raise an umbrella— toward the morning light. Sometimes, from the corner of my eye, I think I see them sitting cross-legged beneath the leaves or leaning on the stems, peering up at the green, their iridescent wings fluttering gently at their sides. But when I stare at them directly, they instantly disappear. I laugh at their shyness, and their own silver laughter joins with mine, and the leaves do a little dance to the sound. It makes the morning, I tell you, this laughing with fairies and leaves.
“Measure your life,” the wise man said, not by the number of breaths you breathe, but by the number of moments that take your breath away.” This one, for instance, where I sit in my warm loft remembering how the air smelled, how the colors were so intense they seemed unreal, how the huge oncoming storm spread its powerful front across the whole horizon. This moment, where I am sheltered and warm and treasuring the memory of that January day when the scene, indeed, took my breath away.
I step out of my dream— the one where I’m planning supper, reminding myself to buy gas, thinking about the job I need to finish— and wake to flowers. Flowers! Imagine! Muted afternoon light pours in the window casting soft shadows on their petals. And outside, pearly raindrops glisten on the tips of the spruce’s green needles. They could have slipped right past me, the raindrops, the flowers. The rain, after all, had been falling for hours. The flowers had been on my table for days. And so they slid into the background, unnoticed wallpaper, dim behind my dream. But now, as if some silver bell just rang, I am awake and seeing them, as if for the very first time. Such joy!
The sun, at the year’s beginning, always sets behind a stand of trees across the lake on a little peninsula all its own. I discovered this serendipitously on New Year’s Eve four years ago. Each year since I’ve come here to stand in this exact spot. It’s a tradition now, one filled with awe and wonder. And today I stood here again, before the tall gold grasses, before the skim-ice on the lake whose open waters mirrored the trees and the sky, and I watched the clouds part just enough, for one brief moment, to let the light of the sun shine through.
Not all days are made for playing outside. Some days, if you have any sense at all, are better spent examining the stitching on the quilt, trying to decide whether the pink flowers or the blue ones are your favorites. If worse comes to worse you could play Tease the Dog. But for my part, the quilt is the thing. Hide there. Grab a nap. Dream of sunshine. That’s the way, I say, to spend a winter day.
Take a good look, I whisper, passing the old barn. This sight is one to save; it’s one of the last of its kind, nearly a relic. But its roots are deep and still it holds on, alive and productive, regardless of the times. It holds the stories of generations, their sweat and celebrations, setbacks and victories, ways of life hardly known to us now, but floating on time’s river nevertheless, into a foreign world. It holds the songs of children playing in the gardens, the low moos of cows echoing from the barn, the growling of old tractors working the rocky fields. It stands for endurance, for relying on nothing but faith and hard work to carry you through the next season, the next day. It sings the defiance of survivors, and their strength and satisfaction. It’s down-to-earth come to life, and its roots are deep.
The sun would be out in the morning, they said, but clouds would return later. I headed out. I had errands to run, but first I would indulge in a drive down country roads to see the woods and the farmlands and barns in this January sun’s rare light. I’d take a Sunday drive.
Six miles down the road, a turn to the west revealed the immense cloud bank rising from the southwest. I turned south to meet the highway again and make my stops.
The cloud bank flew above me to my destination and when I parked I was beneath its head, broad and wide, its wake of plump white rows quilting the sky, as pale ribbons of lavender gray lay strewn
in spaced arches across them. It raced over the sky, its stretched arms reaching both the north and south horizons.
In a trance of amazement, I walked toward the store, looking at my fellow shoppers to see if they, too, were as stunned by the sight as I. But their faces were blank and grim against the cold, and not one of them saw that they walked beneath a great wonder.
I have two bulletin boards above the desk here in my office. Over the passing months, they have become cluttered with notes and reminders and photos to the point that they’re screaming at me to DO SOMETHING! It sort of feels like it does when you realize that you really, really need a haircut.
So I added “Re-do bulletin boards” to my Do/Projects list. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at what’s there now, mining for the gems in the clutter. One of the notes I noticed this week was a list of “The Nine Choices for Happiness,” which are the chapter titles of the book How We Choose to Be Happy. The first one on the list is “Intention.”
Because it’s the first week of the New Year, I thought about all the resolutions that people made at the year’s dawning. A resolution, I thought, is the same as an intention, except you declare it more forcefully, maybe stomping your foot or clenching your hands into fists as you say it.
Either way, I hear that most of them “don’t work.” And I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer of us even bother making them any more, as if turning over a new leaf is an outmoded fashion. It’s not. And I feel kind of sorry for all those discarded resolutions. Somehow we bought in to a belief that making one was like waving a magic wand; it would instantly empower you to move in a whole new direction in your life. Nope. That’s not the way it works. The intention doesn’t make things change; it nudges you to do it.
We also mistakenly think that intentions will kick in automatically the moment we create them for ourselves. But things only become automatic when we repeat them over and over until we do them with hardly a thought. An intention could only be automatic if we were already doing what it asks, and of course we aren’t. We just want to. In fact, We want to so much that we intend to. Beginning now. And intending is an excellent beginning.
It’s a tricky one, though. We declare our intention with so much fervor that we’re sure it will leap forward, grab our attention, and ignite our will power at every fork in the road. And then the doggone thing floats out of sight like a wisp in the wind and doesn’t drift around again for a while. We put a lot of hope in that intention, and a lot of good it did us, we say when we remember it. That’s the tricky part. We can make up all kinds of excuses for not reaching out to pull that intention back to us again. We guess we weren’t meant to succeed. We guess intentions don’t work. We forget why we wanted that in the first place. We decide it doesn’t matter.
That’s the kind of thinking that gave rise to the old expression that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hell is exactly where defeatism takes us.
But imagine you’re outdoors on a lovely, sunny day when you spot a little feather floating by, right at eye level. It looks so bright and appealing. Imagine that you reach out and gently cup it in your hand and draw it toward you where you can get a good look at it. That’s what you need to do with good intentions that drifted away.
Now that it has your attention again, let it tell you about the possibilities it carries for you and about how relieved and alive you’ll feel if you let it guide you. Then figure out a way to keep it around where it can smile its encouragement to you on a regular basis. Write it on notes, or on your calendar. Name a pebble after it and carry it in your pocket. Find a wallpaper to represent it on your phone.
Suppose you actually do that. You pick something that you want to do, to make a part of your usual way of being, something that you imagine will make you feel more alive, more purposeful, more at peace. You invent a reminder of some kind to keep your intention top of mind. Then what?
Well, for one thing, your intention will begin to guide your choices. It will sit right up there on your shoulder with your good angel and whisper in your ear with reminders. And that’s a lot. Even if you don’t follow its guidance, it will have called your attention to the fact that you have a choice.
You can give your intention more power by taking time to daydream about it now and then. You can nurture it by asking yourself affirmative questions about it, such as “Why am I seeing so many ways that I can be more . . . ?” or “Why is it getting easier to . . . now?” Just ask yourself the question from time to time and see what answers float up from your mind.
I’m going to keep that list of choices for happiness on my bulletin board when I redo it. And I’m going to post a word or two there to remind me of my intentions for the coming year. They inspire me. And what better way to begin a new year than to feel inspired!
Wishing you delightful, focused, good intentions, and an inspired New Year!
