what about happiness
It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.
Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.
Linda Pastan, “The Obligation to be Happy
There are monks who sing
for the laity—May you be happy,
and today I sing it, too,
though I have not been
anointed and have no special
sway, but I stitch my song
into the morning’s ferocious wind
and send it everywhere,
May you be well.
The wind rips the words
from my lips. I sing them
again. This is all
we have in this world,
the way we choose
to meet it.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I only began to relax into wholeness when I learned to embrace the impure along with the pure, seeing that they are both made of exactly the same energy, just as the petal and thorn are pervaded by the same sap. This was the hardest lesson, and the easiest.
– Fred LaMotte
One of the lies would make it out that nothing
Ever presents itself before us twice.
Where would we be at last if that were so?
Our very life depends on everything’s
Recurring till we answer from within.
The thousandth time may prove the charm.
– Robert Frost, “Snow”
life: acoustic & amplified 