It has been raining all day, and the bark on those big pines in our backyard has turned black and soaked with rain.
This is the pine trees being happy.
Beyond the pines, the slow-moving river mirrors the grey sky. This is the river and sky being happy and showing us what happiness means.
The crow puffs up its feathers, preens, and flies away with a ‘Caw! Caw!’ This is the crow showing us what it means to be happy.
Nature is always happy, no matter what. The trees, the crows, the river, and the sky all want us to be happy, too, and yet, on this earth, it’s only and always people who are unhappy. We humans don’t even know what real happiness is. We think it means getting something we like, finding the perfect partner, having things go our way, having more money, or living somewhere else where the weather is always great. We think happiness is dependent on circumstance, whereas a tree is indifferent. A tree is happy, rain or shine, summer or winter.
You’d think, for instance, that those yellow tulips in the vase on the table would be unhappy about being yanked up and brought inside. And yet, even as they droop and die, they exude happiness and beauty. If you stop and spend a moment with those tulips, listen to them with your eyes, with your heart…if you die to those tulips, you can’t help but say, with a little inside voice, ‘Hooray for tulips! Hooray for life! Hooray for death!’ You see? The tulips are telling us what it means to be happy. They are telling us that happiness, that life, demands death.
The big pines, the river, the crows, and the sky are all one seamless whole, all one, undividable, whole. The mind likes to separate them and put them in files and folders on our desktop. The mind, however, can’t do whole; it can’t do Now. It can only do ‘then and when’ in a thousand bits and pieces. And that’s why we humans have such a hard time with happiness. True happiness is only Now, never then, and when.
The kicker is that we are already happy. We are happiness, 24-7. But our happiness gets lost, hidden behind the screen of then and when. The big pines, the sky, the river, the crows, and the tulips are only trying to remind us of something we have forgotten.
They only want us to wake up.
-Belfast, ME, May 25, 2013