happy in the inside

This kind of happy is hard to talk about. It is hard to find the words. The words of artists of all kinds, in those moments when they said it just right, those are the words I fall back on. My gift of a creative cousin posted this one today.

"what i give to my clay is what it will give back to me. in my inner world of intentions, honesty is more powerful than intention. if i can quiet my mind long enough, this honesty will bring to light what i could not hear my subconscious telling me." cary weigand

I want to try to do that. Right now. I want enough quiet in my wordy mind so that the truth of this kind of happy can float to the top and be spoken. (sigh ....) It's a conundrum I am discovering. Writerly honesty is just like honesty in clay, but the quiet for a writer has to result in words. Getting rid of thoughts in words so that the truth in words can bubble up - or, really, sprout - do that baby leaves thing, and then finally reach for the sun and turn into something identifiable - and then bloom and be its own fruiting thing. Wait. What? Words? Words in the way? Waaaah! ----start again.

One of those marvelous little miracles happened yesterday - for about the fifth or sixth time in as many weeks. It's like I've rounded a corner into some kind of Alice in Wonderland, decorated for a party Hogwarts great hall, fantastic little place in the middle of the woods, and all the stuff around me keeps surprising me by bursting open and spraying something wonderfully scented and laugh-out-loud adorable into the air. I laugh. I breathe it in. And then I just stand there - being happy. Eventually, my eyes open and focus and I walk around, and peer down at the funny little flowers, and then it happens again! Pop! This time, right in my face!

See, someone in our high school class started a Facebook page. Slowly, all the sweet, amazing kids I knew back then, with all our goofy memories and not a few pictures of that moment in time and place, it's all coming together at this page, and over and over, someone says, "hahaha! I remember that!" We're not kids anymore - but you'd never know we haven't talked to each other since then. We still know each other. We still love each other. And this is sweet and marvelous on its own, but yesterday, one of the buds popped in my face.

One of the Daves (we had several in our class - Davids and Johns and Steves took up a lot of hte roll call) - he called me. On the phone. And we talked and talked and talked ... and I discovered that I wasn't the only one noticing the oddball minutia of our fifth grade play about Elijah and our sixth grade teacher from Georgia ... and the Pleasantville community where we were kids once, kids, young and strong and happy and always a little bit confused.

What an odd spring this has been. I keep getting friends returned to me - and my youth restored to me, but like a buried treasure that's been aging and turning into something it wasn't when I buried it. My daughter came home safe and sound. My daughter has been returned to me. My job at the library is becoming more sustaining to me - more responsible, more pay per hour. There is an incoming tide right now, and it's brimming over with these weird little bursts of happiness - it's a tide that brings a wild garden that bursts at random and makes me drunk and laughing.