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In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is as much a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience.
That is what May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995), who has written so movingly about unhappiness and its cure, explores in her poem “The Work of Happiness,” included in her indispensable Collected Poems: 1930–1993 (public library).
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
by May SartonI thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on the secret of happiness and Kurt Vonnegut on the one word it comes down to, then revisit Sarton’s poem “Meditation in Sunlight” and her magnificent ode to solitude.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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By Leo Babauta
I’m on my first international flight since the pandemic started, and I got lucky enough to have a window seat. Flying to Costa Rica by way of Guatemala to lead a retreat, I’m looking out at a vast expanse of mountains in Mexico … and I’m in absolute awe.
What a miracle this is, to be flying so magically through the air, over such majestic stretches of this Earth!
I noticed that when I was traveling a lot before, I got pretty jaded about flights. Ho hum, another flight, let’s get this over with, no big deal, I’m an experienced traveler, not some wide-eyed child. How did I get this jaded to the wonders of life? How do any of us get so jaded?
Life is miraculous. Life is filled with wonders. Life is majestic and magical.
And I don’t just mean the magic of flight — which our ancestors would have thought was sorcery, by the way. I mean the magic of toasters and heating and houseplants. I mean the miracles of each human being we encounter on the street, the wonder of having someone love you, the sacredness of grief and heartbreak, the joys of a berry.
Every moment, we have the opportunity to wake up to wonder, to awe, to everyday miracles. It is enough to make your heart leap with joy, to overwhelm your soul, if you let it. Every day, we have access to this, in so much abundance.
Will you let it in?
The post Everyday Wonder appeared first on zen habits.
What is awe? And can experiencing awe lead to a happier, healthier life? Henry Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s contemplative essays on other subjects, especially travel and tourism, and this profile-reported essay hybrid is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative but not dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the day’s small wonders.
Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul.
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