How're things?

Had a chat with an old friend by phone last night. At a distance he can sometimes recede to an abstraction, that friend-that-I-valued, but on the phone the affection is alive and present, and the unhurried flow of conversation allows No Real News to be unpacked into the surprising range of developments and experiences, the large and small dramas that make up a life, in the months since we last spoke. A gift to reconnect.

In particular, being asked "how is married life treating you?" allowed me to wallow consciously in the self-indulgence of the long holiday weekend, not least the still-fresh luxury of having no advance plans, of making it up as we go along. Too rare, not at all undervalued... (neither the time nor the company)

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs,
or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

(poem via A Mindful Life)