THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love & happiness

April 30, 2020

The little tags on my Yogi Tea bags are reminding me that

People who love are happy.

and exhorting me to

Live light, travel light, spread the light, be the light.

*

The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart 

Goes all decorum.

(from “Measure for Measure” by William Shakespeare, Act 1, scene 3)

*

I was taking a virtual tour of the Rijksmuseum [click on link] and came upon the wonderful painting “The Merry Family” by Jan Steen (1626-1679). The commentator on the painting said that this was supposed to be a kind of cautionary tale: if the adults get drunk, horse around, and play music they are setting a bad example for the children. To me the painting sends a different “message.” It is a picture of human happiness. It reminds me of a poem by one of my dad’s favorite poets, Carl Sandburg:

HAPPINESS

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.

And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

—Carl Sandburg

*

Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” is a celebration of earthly pleasures. The Fool’s name is Feste, which suggests “festive” and “festival”—a joyful feast. Malvolio, the Puritan, wants everyone to stop drinking and dancing and singing and go to bed. He’s outnumbered. Sir Toby Belch sums up the play’s philosophy:

“Care’s an enemy to life.”

*

I love Louis Armstrong. I got to see him perform a couple times. His joy is sublime!

I recently woke up with this song in my head, “A Lot of Living to Do”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvQDJXR85c

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I’m no Oscar Wilde, but in the course of my long life I’ve come up with an aphorism or two. Here’s one:

Happiness is the art of not making yourself miserable.

William Blake wrote many doozies. For example:

The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.

*

Here’s the first poem in The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne:

The Salutation

         These little limbs,

    These eyes and hands which here I find,

These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,

    Where have ye been? behind

What curtain were ye from me hid so long?

Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

         When silent I   

    So many thousand, thousand years

Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,

    How could I smiles or tears,

Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?

Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

         I that so long

    Was nothing from eternity,

Did little think such joys as ear or tongue

    To celebrate or see:

Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,

Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet.

         New burnished joys,

    Which yellow gold and pearls excel!

Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,

    In which a soul doth dwell;

Their organised joints and azure veins

More wealth include than all the world contains.

         From dust I rise,

    And out of nothing now awake;

These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,

    A gift from God I take.

The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,

The sun and stars are mine, if those I prize.

         Long time before

    I in my mother’s womb was born,

A God preparing did this glorious store

    The world for me adorn.

Into this Eden so divine and fair,

So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.

         A stranger here

    Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;

Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,

    Strange all and new to me;

But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

*

One of my favorite short poems by Walt Whitman is this one:

BEGINNING MY STUDIES

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much, 

The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,

The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,

The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,

I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,

But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

*

An Old Tale

Once there was a king who wanted to be happy. His wise counselors informed him that he needed to acquire the shirt of a happy man. So, he sent his soldiers out in quest of such a shirt. One by one they returned empty-handed. None of them could find a happy man. Finally, the last soldier returned. 

The king asked, “Did you find a happy man?” 

“Yes,” the soldier said. 

“Where’s his shirt?,” asked the king. 

“He didn’t have one.”

*

May all people be happy.

—Johnny Stallings

*

Kim Stafford kindly shared this excerpt from his book-in-progress, Writing for Happiness:

I invite you to use writing to live in accordance with the Dao, to write in order to achieve fluent response to events, to behave in synch with “happ,” what happens. This is a different path to happiness than what I once understood, because it does not avoid the difficult, but by the hands-on process of writing, incorporates the difficult into the search for equanimity. To be with happ is to be happ-y. That is, to be honest, a realist, practical about the available dimensions of joy that exist within a matrix of complexity and difficulty.      

The pursuit of happiness may be an inalienable right, but it is also a stern task. “You don’t get to the good life by living the good life,” says the tough immigrant proverb, and so it is with happiness. You don’t get to be truly happy by coasting along avoiding the difficult. Life is suffering, after all, and happiness can’t change that, even as it flickers and is snuffed, and flickers again.     

But the pursuit of happiness calls to us all the same. I believe that an enhanced definition of happiness makes the task possible—that to be “happy” is to live in accordance with what happens—and that the serious play of writing, jotting, scribbling, composing can be a way to pursue—and attain—a responsible and generous kind of happiness.

—Kim Stafford