Happiness
A piece written this morning for the Deer Isle Writers Group …
Happiness lives in the space created by all-consuming beauty, all-consuming because in that space, in that moment, the beauty itself, whether perceived by eye or ear or nose or mouth or hand, or somehow, simply, strangely known, is everything. The beauty is, is all the world to me in that moment, and I am happy, though it is not even exactly true to say that I am happy, because, in that place, in that moment, I have no awareness of “I,” the beauty, the overwhelming beauty simply is, and I am somehow gifted with briefly being in the same place and moment as the happiness that is, with or without me.
The stone, the rock, the enormous erratic, perched on the granite ledges extending into the water from McGlathery’s eastern shore, seemingly out of place, is very much in its place. It defines, commands the place, but would be other were it not in that place, that numinous space, surrounded by human activity, but regardless of it, ledges washed by the tides, visited by ermine and gulls, islands emerging near and far from the ever-restless sea. When I turn the corner and see it, when it is not just that I see it, but that in that space and in that moment it becomes the world, all the world, there is happiness.
The frenzied, but careful and ecstatic, interplay of cello and violin and piano, creates its an irresistible gravity that draws me, draws everything, into its orbit. The ears are piqued, are pleased, by the sounds, but it is the heart, the loins, the stuff of being itself, and of my being in so far as I may share being itself, that is moved, deeply stirred, transported, transformed, awash with happiness.
The waters of the creek run clear and cold and powerful, iridescent, translucent, an uncanny green, flowing, rushing, ceaselessly careening down the rock-strewn river bed bearing waters from glaciers high above on the flanks of Mt. Baker into the the ever-burgeoning Skagit River. I watch, I look, I become the looking, there is only the looking, the flowing, the sparkling, the cavorting, the dancing, dancing, dancing of the waters. And there is happiness.
I hold the two broken halves of the crusty bread in my hands and I say the words, “This is my body,” but it is not my body and not my words, and, though it is my hands, it is not my hands that offer this bread. I am, in that space, in that moment, consumed by a giving, an inviting, an all-consuming, but all-creating loving, that is so much beyond what I can give, beyond whom I can invite, beyond what I can create. I am invited into that space, into that moment, along with all who surround me in that sanctuary, and, indeed, with all who surround us in the sanctuary that is the earth. There is in that space, in that moment, a being, a loving, a beauty that fills us and binds us to each other and to the One from whom flows all the beauty and all the love and all being. And there is happiness.