Among the Weave

Yesterday, I was noticing how happiness shows up among the greater weave of all things showing up. Happiness is sprinkled among it. Things that make me happy tend to come forward while everything else recedes in the undulation of everything weaving together.

I noticed that first glances at things can be at first disconcerting, like the shape of that man's head, or the pull of that other man's voice, or that gift store with too many things to look at. Relaxing and looking again can see through initial prickly reactions, and new appreciations can form.

I attended a performance last night by the poet fiddler of Alaska - something like that. I didn't really like his sloppy look or his subtly oppressive need to speak. But if I closed my eyes and let the music and words play in my imagination, I got into it, could hear the wisdom in the fiddle music beyond the performer, could let go all those words having to be gathered and made sense of.

On the way home, so many things registered as happiness-inducing. Too many to list. But they zoomed forward into my line of sight and my inner ear, leaving the rest of the weave of all things tp draw back into the shadows. Were I not driving from theater to home, I wouldn't have had occasion to experience all those parts of happiness. So much of happiness arrives simply by driving into it without any idea what of it will come.

During sleep, I dreamed of a romance that may well only ever exist there in that dream. The pursuit of it pulled all my attention. The embrace of it rewarded me with happiness, though without the same pull toward me as I toward the pursued. Perhaps that made it all the more entrancing.

After all, we're talking about the pursuit of happiness, which implies not being it, but reaching out for it as though it is not already here.

I notice the French chose *fraternity* over the *pursuit of happiness* in their constitution. I hear their conversations are more a gathering of reflections about a shared topic than what in America is often more about who can talk about themselves the most impressively.

Here's to the happiness in both pursuits,

--Steve