If You're Happy And You Know It

I don’t blog nearly as often as I used to. There are no grand excuses other than the one truth of my life: I flat out don’t have time. I am so busy, and between trying to keep up on my personal journal, my job, my school, my life in general, I just run out of time to blog.  The draw though, it is there.  I feel it humming like a magnet in the deepest part of my bones as I struggle against the pull to fulfill my other responsibilities.  The polarity always wins, in time, and I find myself back here. Maybe something touched me so profoundly I needed to share it. Maybe I had a fabulous birthday. Maybe it is something big enough I need my family from all around the world to know about it.  Maybe the writer inside of me starts to overflow and force itself out of every orifice in my body until I feel like I am going to burst into a million pieces, dripping with the wasted talent harbored in my arthritic fingers.  Whatever the reason, the pull is always victorious.  Today, the pull is winning.

I was recently exposed to the idea that all good writers are ones who write about pain, about fear, about the creepy unknown, the aloneness of nature, etc.  They dedicated an entire era of literature to this, we call it Romanticism. And while I would agree some of the best pieces of literature I have ever read come from those emotions, I would argue that a happy writer can produce just as effective work.  Robert Frost wrote this poem called “Out, Out –” that destroyed my illusions about early 19^th century farming America. Arguably one of the best artifacts in his museum of writing, the poem satisfies the idea that pain and hurt produce the best work.  Conversely, he wrote another poem entitled “A Prayer in Spring” full of beauty and nature in the most cheerful season it has to offer.  Both are powerful: One about pain and harsh realities, another about new beginnings and pure love, and yet both move readers, both inspire scholars, both hold a place in one of the most prized museums of written word in the world.

So why? Step outside of romance, outside of heartbreak and heartache, step away from fear – what moves you outside of those things? What I have learned is that the happy things that move me, the things that jerk my entire being into the awareness that I live a gorgeously, beautiful life are more sacred. I want them for my own. I want the memories only in my heart. Thusly, I don’t share them as quickly. Selfish right?

I am making a movement to stop that.  I am challenging any other writer who might read this and suffer the same tendencies in the literature they chose to read or write to open their mind to some pleasant ideas.

It would embarrass him, so I won’t do it, but I could write an entire blog about how it feels when my little brother dances with me in my kitchen. It calls up memories of learning to dance in the kitchen in our youth, the way dancing has always brought joy to our family, and the perfect recollection of dancing with him at my wedding: the tears I cried, the words he spoke as I started an exciting new chapter, the pride in his voice.  And all that from 30 seconds of swing dance to an old George Straight song on the radio. The inspiration I received in this moment lead to 3 pages of personal journal writing.  Pure happiness, and some of my best work resulted from it.

I went camping with my husband this summer. It was wonderful.  We saw a moose that was so close to us we could make out the snot dripping from his nostrils in the early morning air.  I think about that morning, and I taste the campfire biscuits and gravy in my mouth. I feel the warm sun at 10,000 feet beating down on my back, and I feel the cooling rush of the breeze as it rushes through the Pine Trees, down to the river bank, across the road and into the Aspens, rustling the leaves and creating a symphony in nature greater than anything Bach ever composed. I feel the gentle pressure of his hand in the small of my back as he gains my attention and points out a young buck deer on the opposite side of the moose, but equally close.  I hear the sound of the camera shutter. I feel the effects of a smile creeping up my face and as he stares into my eyes, and I know that my eyes are doing that sparkling thing he loves so much that is achieved only in moments of complete, encompassing bliss.  Those moments took up less than a minute of my time, but they inspired hours, and hours, and hours of happy, joyful, quality writing.

So step away.  Of course I have created works of art in moments of pain, of fear, in the depths of a trial.  But I have also, with far much joy in my life, created works of art when my heart beat full of the kind of deep, red, happy blood it only bleeds when you are consumed by delight and suffocated with blissful glee.  Feel it, let it cultivate the artist inside of you, let it consume you.  You just might be surprised with yourself.

Here is an artist’s rendering of one of the most joyful moments of my life: drinking my favorite {virgin} morning cocktail, breakfasting at one of my favorite eateries, in the company of one of my absolute favorite people, laughing from the depths of my guts, and storing it all away in my memory bank of happiness.