Chasing The Promise Of Happiness

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.