Living Happiness

Yesterday morning found me sitting on my back veranda in a pool of warm sunlight. I was eating creamy Greek yogurt – rich and decadent – with a topping of fresh, sweet strawberries, and looking out over Souda Bay at the White Mountains in the distance.

The morning was deceptively still. I say deceptively for in all of the nooks and crannies of our garden, all kinds of activity was being engaged in by bees and butterflies, birds and snails. There was a great deal of flitting about, a great deal of alighting on flowers and taking off again, and, by the snails, a great deal of slowly but surely creeping along (who also seem to think that our bathroom is the Copa Cabana of Chania but that is another story for another day).

Spring is coming to Greece. At least, this is the belief shared by almost all of my Greek friends. “There will be no more winter,” they boldly proclaim like the most famous of their ancient seers, “Spring is on it way.” And in preparation for its grand arrival, they then proceed to open up windows and shutters, throw wide the doors, and begin the process of Greek spring cleaning: banging out carpets, sweeping balconies, changing light fixtures, hosing down driveways. Spring is here!

I love the Greek word for spring. It seems to capture the season so much more than the word I am used to. It is Anoiksi, which literally means “Opening.” Don’t you just love this? How can you not?

Buds open, flowers open, doors and windows get flung wide open, and so, too, I often find does my heart. Cramped and crowded from a winter indoors, my heart is the first part of me that goes running full tilt outside when the first rays of warm sunlight tiptoe onto the doorstep. It throws off its heavy winter coat, slips into an airy sundress, and twirls in increasingly drunken rings until it crashes, dizzy and delirious, in the buttercups at its feet. Only when the weather gets a bit warmer does my body finally follow suit. My heart has been out there long before, lazily waiting in the grass under the lemon tree, finding cloud shapes in the sky overhead. “What took you so long,” it always asks me when I finally do arrive, “and where’s the lemonade?”

Would love to hear from you today, as always.

Namaste,

opening flickrphoto by Madison Guy

additional flickrphoto by Little Laddie

flickr photo by: nathan tia

It’s a Tuesday morning and the sky is gray and cloudy. The sun looks like it might come out to play, but I hope it doesn’t. I would be very happy if it stayed in today as I am wont to do. I have gathered myself and my tea and cozied up in my corner room. The door is closed, the candles will be lit, and the winds of inspiration will play over me like an aeolean lyre. This is what I am hoping.

I sat at these very windows the other day and watched the trees being whipped around in manic fashion. There was no delicacy in the playing the wind was doing that day: I heard, instead, a full-blown orchestra – trumpets blasting, tympani rolling, and the frenetic strains of viola.

When I was young I played the flute. For many years, actually. I began at the age of nine and played regularly and competitively until my early twenties. The how and the why of my not continuing this passion are of and for another time, but play I did, in regiments, concerts, symphonies and orchestras.

Music has rests. Did you know that? For any given instrument in an orchestra, there are times during the flow of the composition where rests are demanded. Instrument is down. Counting is begun. We listen to the work of the players around us and await our turn to chime in again, to contribute our part to the overall harmony and melody of the piece. Rarely, if ever, do all instruments play all of a composition from start to finish. This isn’t where the music lies.

Even melody itself has rests, its own built-in syncopations that rely on the breaking up of beats instead of one monotonous cadence. Some notes get more attention than others, some get less, and there are mini-breaks between the two, as well: short, audible pauses that yield the rhythm and melody that make our tune something catchy, breezy, melancholic, or gloriously beautiful.

So, if this is true in music, might it not also be true in our own lives? We frequently insist on picking up our instrument every day and playing at full volume until the cows come home (or until we do … whichever happens first). But why do we believe that the music will stop simply because we have?

What if, instead, we did stop … for a day or two … and listened to the music of the life around us. What are its movements? Its leitmotifs? Its themes?

And what if we paid attention to the other players in the symphony that is our own?

One of my favorite sounds in the world is the sound of an orchestra tuning up: the hum of the violin, the pipe of the flute, the drone of the cello, and the sigh of the french horn. I feel in my bones that something exciting is about to happen, that beauty awaits. I know I am about to be transported.

Peace be with you today.