~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
“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!
Warmly,
Susan
Look how the weeds lay here, bent,
leaning, and yet catching the light just so.
Such haphazard beauty, unintended,
yet inevitable, I suppose, an expression of
its nature, a variant of its song.
And look how it’s hidden, right here
in plain sight. You could walk by and think
it was no more than a tumble of weeds.
But perhaps it’s a gift, waiting for an artist’s eye
to see in it a golden boat on a frothy sea.
The wind’s cold overpowered the heat of the sun,
it’s warmth having to travel 93 million miles
while the wind was right here, stiff and strong.
The stalks bent in its force, unresisting.
They learned long ago that the way to meet
a blow was to bow to its power.
Between gusts, they straightened again,
and again they bowed, as a new gust came.
They considered it a dance.
And come what may, they decided
they would dance until the music
stopped, or leveled them.
Either way, they would be proud,
knowing they had given it
their all.
More rain is in the forecast,
maybe mixed with a bit of snow.
Even now the clouds have gathered
in the western sky. The sleeping fields
dream beneath puddles and frost,
oblivious of the weather. But we,
who have gone long days without
a glimpse of sun, danced today
under great swaths of blue sky,
counting it as a gift and a blessing.