Happy

I can’t deny it, I can’t ignore it. I can’t understand it, either, but here it is: I’ve been feeling really…happy lately.

It feels strange to write. It feels dorky and decidedly unhip. I want to equivocate, a little. I want to say “I feel centered” or “I feel blessed” or “I feel grateful,” and actually I do feel all those things too. But those aren’t really reasons to stop in the middle of what you’re doing, as I just did five minutes ago, to start a blog entry, are they. No, the real deal is that I feel…happy.

In a way it makes complete sense because I have a lot to be happy about: I have boundless heaps of privilege on all sorts of levels, I know multiple human beings I love to distraction, and I am currently living rent-free on a resort island with the fantastic woman who not only gave birth to me in the middle of a blizzard but also refrained from having me thrown into the sea when I was an insufferable thirteen year old, for which act of charity on her part I remain grateful.

But there are so many reasons to doubt, to mourn, to despair, and I don’t need to get into them, do I, you have your own list. Mine personal ones include being far away from my gorgeous partner, my continuing financial difficulties, and the general instability and uncertainty of my life, ongoing now for almost a year. And politically and globally: girl, please. I mean where to begin, right—financial crisis! Campaign craziness! People dying of hunger in the streets of every city of every country in the world, no lack in sight of opportunities to perpetrate racism, sexism, homophobia etc, and hey have you noticed that the weather has been acting weird for the last couple of years or so?

So how to explain? What’s the balance between the fabulous and the frightening, the lovely and the unbearable? How do you pick your way through that maze, finding your balance sharply and softly, and how do you know what’s at the center of that maze, anyway? How do you even know if that maze even has a center—I mean what makes you think that there’s any center anywhere and are you kidding yourself by hoping that you’ll wobble through somehow?

I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I can’t even tell me. All I know is that I’ve spent the day alone, doing basically whatever I wanted and feeling lucky, peaceful and…happy. I hung my sheets out to dry and cleaned the downstairs and listened to my iPod on Shuffle on my way to the grocery store, where I got the ingredients for my favorite lunch, which is still my favorite lunch even though I have it almost every day. I did some paid work on Thursday and Friday and I have the prospect of a little more next week and I felt proud about that. I spoke to my sister and a friend in Seattle on the phone and I had three huge cups of Earl Grey tea and dunked a ginger snap into every single one. I inched towards New Zealand again today, and did some work to prepare to inch again tomorrow. I chatted online to my amore, who asked me to scan a page from my paper journal upon which we drew pictures on our giddy flight from Auckland to Apia. When the sun started to go down I rode my mom’s bike to the Quiet Gardens, where I saw five iguanas, a monitor lizard, a saltwater crocodile, three baby peacocks, five sandhill cranes, a huge banyan tree, and more ibises than I care to enumerate. I had a great dinner and am looking forward to finishing a craft project and watching a good DVD tonight.

That’s it, that’s all. That’s all I wanted to say—that the world is difficult and unsure, I guess, and that things are either changing too fast or too slow, depending on how you look at them—but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that amongst all that I’ve had a warm bright day, that I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, that I’ve been and still am…happy.