Chasing The Promise Of Happiness

Visiting the Writing Gods

Here again at the coffee shop having coffee and visiting the writing gods. I was dizzy when I got up this morning. An hour later a fire broke out close by. Music always follows me and tells me what I need. “I really don’t know life at all…”Joni Mitchell croons to me. Still somewhat dizzy, my lungs are hurting and there are pains in my gut as well. The fire has now created a toxic release of chemicals into the already smoky air.

Darkness follows me these days waiting for a chance to get in. I worry about money and it leaps into action, pulling me down. Beauty and music lift me back up. It is a fight that began long ago. A leftover from the nightmare of my second marriage. I go up and down – half full, half empty. Life is good. Life is bad. It is a state of mind and it makes all the difference. The mind controls the life and yet it seems the other way around.

I take a deep breath and feel a slice of pain and end up coughing. We sing to live. We dance to live. We write to live. Life is full of illusion. Now a new song comes over the speakers and some unknown person makes everything okay with banjo music. No words and still it defeats deadness and lies.

How to live through each moment and be happy – that is the challenge. People all have their methods and give me lots of free advice. I know they are all mean well and I also know they are struggling – some more than others. It is like the big unspoken secret that life is so hard. The elephant in the room. The fantasy is that life is fun and easy. We desperately want our children to believe that but they know. Even learning to walk is hard.

Life is full of puzzles. In one moment there are birds singing and a flower blooming and the dog running into my arms. In the next moment – I am falling into a hole. There is a fire and smoke and a toxic release of pesticides. There are people in shelters and pains in my lungs. To be okay through it all. To fall down and get up. To cry and then to laugh. No one really has the answers. It just doesn’t work that way.

I asked the Great Spirit to show me the way this morning. I might as well ask. It is the best part of living here – the mountains and the ocean – the sky and the sun and moon. Flowers, birds, rain, clouds. Rivers and creeks and animals. We are perhaps the most disturbed creature of all – the one that can endlessly think and arrive at terrible conclusions and live a vacant life unaware of beauty. How it got this way is beyond understanding. How to get back to our simple selves is too big a question. So yes, Great Spirit – I do surrender my assumed to be brilliant mind and I ask you for help to understand. Or if not that, then maybe clarity to see it doesn’t really matter.

Blank Page

This blank page is overwhelming today. I am empty. The only thing that moves me is the music. I feel like tearing off my clothes and being in bed all day where no one will see me. I have a pain in my gut and my back is aching – sitting here at a coffee table. I push myself more into the back of the bench. The man next to me has pushed his table too close to mine. I’m thinking of packing everything up.
I take another sip of my chai tea with soy milk. No frills. Nothing extra. I have nothing to give. I am spent. I sit here as an alternative to going home and being impatient with my mother. I am angry that she forgets so much – angry that she is not there for me. My neck is stiff as I turn to look outside. I have no energy to even call a friend.
The music fades into quiet for a few moments. I find myself craving that silent space. Now a woman’s voice fills the space. “I’ll do what I want…” I am surprised to find out that I don’t know what I want. Tears well up behind my eyes trying to speak to me. I don’t understand them.
Music is the one thing that stirs me. There is a purity in the voices. There is strength and power in the beat. I need that strength. I am trying to solve the puzzle of this thing called life. The fact that I am now 60 years old hovers over me. What is the point of it all? Money dictates what I do. It has nothing to do with what is important to me. I want to throw things and change how I spend my time. I want to hear the music that moves my soul.
Time passes. We all die. Some of us are remembered. My tears are getting impatient with me. I am frozen in passivity somewhere deep inside – letting time pass. It always has. I am used to that. I have spent years being unhappy. It is so familiar – almost safe to let life pass without a peep. Just live each day as it is given – not complaining – just bending like the willow. There is a time for that but I am 60 years old now. Now is not that time.
Reggae music sings out “What you going to do when your well runs dry?” There it is. That is my question to myself. And I am feeling dry. Empty. Blank. I force myself to do things that do not feel right. I say to myself that I have to be patient a little longer – that I am working on it.
There is an explosion in me. I don’t have the time. I do not have the answers. I feel the unrest.  I have made a hundred new decisions. I need to let the tears come. They will have answers. They have been pushed down for way too long.
I need to be an oak tree. An oak tree with roots that find water wherever it is. An oak tree that does not budge. Committed to myself. Reaching down deep to find my own wisdom. No one else can give me what I need now. I must give it to myself. I bow down to the power of the oak and gather my years of experience on this planet. Perhaps faith is really just remembering.