Happiness is a Warm Tortilla

It's 11:22 -  no, wait -11:23 pm as I begin this post.  I had turned off my computer and was going to be a good girl and go to bed, when, blam! Inspiration hit.  As I was jotting down notes so I'd remember what I wanted to say in the morning, the voice of Annie Dillard spoke into my ear, forcing me to pause with my pencil in midair.  In her book, The Writing Life, she says, "One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. . . The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now."

So here I am, spending it now.  Thanks, Annie.

My last post diddled around with definitions of happiness, but left me feeling, well, unspent.  And there have been so many posts I've read lately discussing happiness that my inspiration is to continue on this thread, this cross-pollination, this interlacing.

I've thought a lot about happiness in the past few years.  For a long time, I despised the word.  I thought happiness was for stupid people.  In my early days as a college student, I took a class where instead of taking roll, Dr. Dorman would ask us a question.  One day she asked, "Would you rather be happy but dull, or brilliant but tormented"?  That was easy, because I already WAS brilliant but tormented, and damn proud of it.

A few years ago I made friends with a man while we were both doing master's degrees in English at the same university.  We had many brilliant conversations ( however, hardly any were tormented), and we were in total agreement about happiness just being a dumb concept.  Ironically, some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in his company.  

Then I fell in love with a man who is naturally happy, and values it.  Slowly, through my relationship with him, and simply wising up, I've come to an appreciation of happiness as something worthy of my attention.

I began to think about the difference between happiness and joy.  As I discussed in a previous post, joy is something I have experienced as non-dependent on circumstance.  It can break in anywhere, anytime.  It's of the moment and of eternity (which I define as the opposite of time).

Happiness, to me, has to do with favorable circumstances, and a span of time.  It's very human. And because of all these things, it's connected to stories.  Happiness is a story we tell ourselves.  At Diamonds and Toads recently, Kate asked her readers if they believe in "happily ever after."  I responded basically that, in terms of relationships, because they embody stories, one can indeed live happily ever after, but not every day.  It's an overarching quality of happiness that infuses the story, even when the particular chapter involves conflict.  It's just like being "in love." You're not going to always feel "in love," but you always do love the person, even when you experience negative feelings toward them for a moment, or a week. 

When I first formulated my definitions of happiness and joy, they lent themselves to a hierarchy:  Joy was more "real" and "valuable" than happiness.  While I no longer despised the concept of happiness, it still didn't seem very important to me .  It seemed false BECAUSE it was dependent on a story for its existence.

But as I discussed in my last post, I've begun to believe in happy stories, which has happened because I finally saw that I was telling myself stories all the time and they were pretty miserable and seemed very real.  It began to dawn on me that I might not be able to escape telling myself stories, but I could change their content.  If I can't grasp Ultimate Reality every moment of my life, I can at least tell myself a happy story to fill in the time.

But now, my rigid definitions of happiness and joy are starting to blur at the edges and meld into each other.  And that's just fine with me.

If I was back in Dr. Dorman's class again, answering that question, I'd say, "How could you possibly be dull if you're truly happy?  What good is brilliance if it doesn't know how to find happiness?"

The Thin Days of Autumn

I'm having one of the best autumns of my life.  This is largely because of where I live these days and because the weather has been so perfect.  The proverbial cool, crisp days have been accentuated by loads of sunshine and multi-colored falling leaves.  I was pleasantly startled the first day that I walked to the San Francisco church and the side of the road was blanketed with yellow.

That's the thing about autumn - it's always a surprise.  I'm used to the green of summer, and then all of a sudden everything's ablaze, blowing and falling, and the whole quality of light and air changes.  In this part of the world, many people use woodstoves to heat their homes, so the smells change too.  Last week, walking home from the church, I encountered a symphony of scent within a fifty-foot span - pinon wood smoke, somebody's dinner cooking, the faint smell of diesel from the highway, falling leaves, and that delicious indescribable wet grass aroma.

And yet, I've also been feeling what I can only call bereft.  This word, bereft, keeps floating back to me, trying to fill the space it describes.  It's funny, but the loss I'm feeling is mostly of illusion, comforting fantasies I've carried with me since childhood, but now are gone, or going.  They were heavy.  And noisy.  There's so much more room for beauty and real joy now.  But beauty and joy are light as a feather; in a strange way, they don't fill the space. 

There are other little losses, too.  When I first saw that the flowers lining the church walkway had been mowed down, I was saddened.  The hummingbird hawk moths would have nothing to come to now, even if they hadn't already left.  Part of what originally drew me to the church is gone.

Except for the baby's breath, Clare's garden has wilted and browned like old lettuce.

But the day I took these photos, I also noticed that the rosebush next to the courtyard wall was in full bloom, and I didn't remember ever having seen it bloom before.  I don't think I even realized it was a rosebush.

I was sore tempted to pick one, so I shot one instead.

The bush had four or five blossoms on it, and they smelled just divine, but the next day, someone had cut them all.  I wonder who got them.  Oh well - they're all dead by now, anyway.

I've had to orient myself to these changes, adjust my expectations and purpose for walking to the church.  I've had to let go of attachments, and ultimately, embrace the dying process.

The association of fall with death is inevitable, the paradox being that it's also the harvest, when a profusion of nourishing life fills the fields, the farmer's markets, kitchens.  Pumpkins are ripe, and it's time for pie.  Apples are falling off the tree faster than I can catch them.  I have an excuse to fill my house with the scents of cinnamon, allspice, and ginger. I find myself wanting to bake more, not just because of everything that's in season, but because autumn brings out the nesting instinct in me, to begin that withdrawal into a warm, family-filled house; to prepare for the holidays that will soon be coming down the pike in grand procession.  I want to light candles and have a reason to turn the oven on.

Oh, I know, some of you are gagging right now.  So I'll get off this subject and talk about death again, how's that?

The first holiday of the season, of course, is Halloween, a night associated with all things macabre and mortuous.  Traditionally, this night is considered to be a "thin" or liminal time, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is more transparent and easier to penetrate.  In pagan spirituality, this night is the beginning of Samhain, a word that has ancient Celtic origins.  In Gaelic folklore, Samhain was the celebration of the final harvest, and may have become associated with death and horror partly because it was the time when the livestock was slaughtered en masse to be preserved as winter sustenance.

Halloween has always been an intense time for me.  Many significant events in my life have occurred on or around Halloween.   When I was nine or ten, I fell while ice skating and went unconscious from a concussion.  When I woke up in the hospital, I couldn't remember what had happened.  The second day in the hospital was Halloween, and because I wanted to trick-or-treat so badly, I pretended I could remember and made up a story about how I'd fallen.  I knew I'd been skating, so I just said I'd been doing a sit spin and lost my balance.  (What really happened came back to me a few days later.  I had to pee but was too lazy, so I was skating sloppily, and caught the back of one blade on the front of the other.)

A few years later on Halloween, when I was fourteen, my family moved from Toronto, where I'd spent my childhood, to Baton Rouge.  I had to miss my best friend's costume party and spend Halloween in a strange place where I didn't know anyone.

Then, when I was twenty-four, I got married in a cemetery at twilight on Halloween.  My husband had introduced me to Clive Barker and the peculiar joys of the horror genre.  On one of our first dates we went to see the Barker movie, Nightbreed, which I was surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed.  From that point, I read all of Clive Barker's books, starting with The Books of Blood.  I was also working in a New Age bookstore and spending my long days there reading neo-pagan spellbooks and the diary of a woman who claimed to be a partial incarnation of the Angel of Death.  So the cemetery wedding was the next logical step, I suppose.  After the wedding, we painted our faces with fake blood and went out to a haunted house, where he won me a matching glow-in-the-dark skull necklace and bracelet, now lost.

My husband and I divorced after a few years, and I went through a transformative spiritual rebirth that eventually led me to join the Presbyterian church where he worked as a sexton.  Long story short, we got remarried in the church, but this time we did it on November 1, All Saints' Day.  However, we didn't actually sign the papers until November 2, All Souls' Day, so we considered our anniversary to span all three of those days.

Do you know the difference between All Saints and All Souls?  If you're Catholic, you probably do.  All Saints' Day commemorates those who have died and gone to heaven, and All Souls' is for those who've died but aren't in heaven yet.  Most mainstream Protestant denominations tend to give a nod to All Saints but ignore All Souls, presumably because of a lack of belief in Purgatory, where Catholics believe certain souls are purified before entering heaven.

Here in New Mexico, we have the Day of the Dead, El Dia de Los Muertos, a colorful, noisy, and light-heartedly creepy version of All Saints/All Souls involving parties on gravesites, and things like candy skulls and pan de muerte (the bread of the dead). 

While all of these holidays have a distinctly Catholic flavor, as with most Christian holidays a little digging uncovers those pagan roots.  The Day of the Dead, for instance, traces back to ancient Aztec practices.  In the pagan worldview, all things spiritual or otherworldly are firmly linked to something practical and this-worldly.  And so the Christian remembrance of those who have passed on comes from an earlier observance of this world's connection to the otherworld, at a time of the year when the natural world appears to die.

So what ever happened to that husband? you might ask  Another long story - but we got divorced again a few years later.  And while we rarely see each other now, there's an underlying understanding and forgiveness between us that divorce has made possible.

When I started this post, I wasn't expecting to be discussing my ex-husband, but it strikes me now as fitting.  And it's downright perfect that our ex-anniversary falls on the thin days of autumn, because while our marriage is very much over - dead, if you will - it was real with a capital R.   Our divorce is a necessary veil that allows me to continue my journey in this world without him as a partner, but at certain times, I see that perhaps in the otherworld, the eternal world, our marriage will always be.  Maybe this is what is meant by "What God joins let no one put asunder."  Maybe it's not a command but a statement of fact.

What dies yet lives.  The time of gathering in the harvest, preserving it to hold onto for the lean months to come, is also a time of letting go, unfastening, releasing.  Fruit falls - a perpetuation of life in the spreading of seeds.  Trees drop their leaves and appear to die, but the sap still flows unseen.  What lived once in our hearts lives still, no matter how long and deep the winter.        

My mom was telling me the other day about Bright Star, the recent movie about John Keats.  I haven't seen it, but our conversation made me think of Keats' concept, "Negative Capability," which he defined as "the ability to rest in mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason."

Yup.  That's what it takes when considering conundrums like how to hold on and let go at the same time, and how illusion can have weight and substance while joy and beauty do not.  Negative Capability is one of my primary aims in life, and surely necessary for appreciating these thin days of autumn.

The School of Joy

According to many Native traditions, hummingbird medicine encompasses joy, which my recent experiences confirm.  The best part is that I've realized I can access joy whenever I want.  Actually, I've discovered this then almost immediately lost it several times in my life, but it's finally sinking in.  The first time was at a party when I was in college.  I was utterly miserable, had partaken of at least two mood-altering substances that seemed to sort of cancel each other out, and was frozen to a couch in sensory and emotional overload.  All I could do was watch everyone having a good time and feel incredibly self-conscious, even though no one was looking at me.  Then I suddenly noticed that underneath all that angst and anxiety was a feeling of pure joy that I could listen to instead of the clamoring of critical voices in my head.  The ability to do this only lasted moments, but it was enough to make an impression, one that I've returned to over and over.

The next significant milestone in this lifelong lesson was when I was about ten years into a miserable marriage, and kept praying for relief.  I wanted God to either change my husband, take away my pain, or show me a way out of the marriage.  This one particular day, I was balled up on the floor, wretched, emotionally starved.  I felt like an empty cold bathtub.  I kept praying the same tired prayer to be taken out of the pain.  Something shifted; I stopped desperately straining to look up and out, and found myself embraced from the inside.  The pain was still there; in fact, it was intensified in a way, but I relaxed into it, stopped desperately treading water and floated, and discovered that there was a gentle warm current of comfort just right there, in the center of the suffering.

What's happening lately is not as dramatic as all that, but that's why it's more effective I think.  Joining with that current is just becoming habit.  A few months ago I read this little book by Pema Chodron:

The subject of the book is Tonglen practice, which is a very simple discipline of breathing in the bad and breathing out the good:  embracing all your angst and anxiety and then breathing out peace.  It was nice to discover that my experiences in this realm have a basis in Buddhist teachings.  Reading about this practice there in a book, put so simply, I was surprised and confirmed.  It struck me as such a reversal of pop spirituality, where you're taught to breathe out the negative and take in the good.  In this sense, Tonglen seems very Christian to me.  It's what Jesus would do.   In fact, it's essentially what he was getting at when he told the Pharisees that it's not what you take into the body that makes you sick, it's what you put out.  And then the whole taking-on-the-sins-of-world thing - well, I don't suppose that requires much explanation.

So I've been doing this Tonglen practice.  Badly, irregularly.  But it works anyway.  And ever since I started seeing and contemplating hummingbirds, I've been hearing this little voice in me that tells me daily that I'm happy.  Not the whole livelong day.  Not yet and maybe never.  But it's enough.  There have been numerous occasions when I could have followed my lethal mind down its dark familiar rabbit hole, but instead I listened to the hummingbird voice, the whirring hum of iridescent wings, erasing my scrawling brain like a whiteboard.  And dare I say it - this way of being is becoming second nature.