HAPPINESS

She loves West Tenth Street on an ordinary summer morning.
(Michael Cunningham, The Hours)

And I love this ordinary summer afternoon,
sitting under my cherry tree full of overripe fruit,
too much for us to pick, an abbonanza of a tree,
I love this dark grey catbird singing its awkward song,
and the charcoal clouds promising rain they don’t deliver.
I love the poem I’ve been trying to write for months,
but can’t; I love the way it’s going nowhere at all.
I love the dried grass that crackles when you walk on it,
leached of color, its own kind of fire.
Way off in the hedgerow, the musical olio of dozens of birds,
each singing its own song, each beating its own measure.
This is all there is: the red cherries, the green leaves,
sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise and fall
of the sweet breeze. Sometimes, just what you have
manages to be enough.

Barbara Crooker

Good Morning Digitial Neighbors! Happy Sunday ADD Irregulars, WSN Contributors, Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Misfit & PHAM, Conversants, Lurkers, Lost or Seekers! I hope that whatever today brings to your threshold manages to be enough. May your blessings outnumber your worries, and your reasons for gratitude smoother any lingering resentments or embittering preoccupations.

Life is not a cake walk, there are failures, disappointments, and sufferings a plenty in the ordinary mix of life if you are striving to move beyond your limits and fixed horizons. But in the striving, the growing beyond our limits of the past, the effort to be more that we were, breaking the chains of our own forging or imposed on us by other, we find reasons to delight. Hopefully if you have a few decades on your life clock, you have already experienced this enough to know that it is a tested path of happiness and reasonable contentment.

It is good to arrive at new a "normal", but once there you have to strive to maintain it until it become second nature, a habit that requires little effort or thought, but rather a mindfulness and remembrance of the path by which you arrived. Each new peak carries with it the danger of complacency and subsequent creeping boredom that seems an ever present threat. If boredom wasn't enough of a trial, one must always be concerned about regression. But those are welcome challenges for the engaged on the path of contentment and the harvest of happiness. Have a great day neighbors!

Round barn - Van Buren County, Iowa