Happiness

I was blog hopping last night and visited CenterDownHome. She has this amazing post about happiness; she uses the analogy of panning for gold.

First, this triggered many memories for me of growing up in Colorado. My extended family would go camping in Yampa Valley and we would spend hours panning for gold bits. Sometimes we would find some, sometimes we would find other things. We once went to Ruby Mountain and mined for garnets and I still have the tin full of stones that I found. It can be tedious work to find treasure in the dust and mud, but the gems are still there.

That's just it, what she was saying. You can focus on the sun beating down or how thick the silt is OR you can slowly and surely find the little treasures and keep them forever. Having the gift of storytelling helps, the gift of words and the love of language used to express this everyday.

I blogged to find community, to document a "portfolio" of our learning, to share with relatives our daily adventures BUT I plan on downloading the blogs in journal form and having them printed out. If anything were to happen to us, our children would have a record of my thoughts, and a photo journal of how our family lived- how much we love them and each other.

Which brings me to my thoughts on the post that got this started: We are incredibly happy. How can this be when, even now, past hurts and abusers can haunt me, when my extended family is broken or far away, and when I hesitate in friendship. Because I don't focus on those, I accept my part, my choices and live my life. We do what we think is best for our family, actively. We parent, actively. I teach, actively. I don't passively let the silt and mud flow by, I grab a pan and sift. I rejoice at the glittering bits and the solid rock. We dance in the sludge like muddy hippos. At some point you let the mud fall back into the river and take another scoop.

Even the tragedies and traumas in my life served purpose. Often these things got me on a different track, opened something in me that had shut tight, or simply wiped the slate clean. Early in our marriage a car accident ended the only time we ever said the word divorce. We'd been married 3 years, the house was falling apart as were our finances- we were arguing in the car when a guy, tired from work, ran a red light. T-boned us and then we hit a concrete barrier. What ensued left us emotionally raw and we looked to each other for support- what we had needed to do all along with everything. And so we have. It by far was not the most traumatic thing I've ever been through, but it was an important one.

Everyone has an interesting life, it is finding the words to make it a story that transforms the ordinary. Those words are often simple, not extravagant. They are the everyday details that draw you in, explain the world and how we live. They are sensory. You have to open yourself up to the world and your own humanness to experience the whole picture. When my students get stuck, I often tell them to sit down and write 5 paragraphs about the same moment. Each one set from the experience of their different senses: sounds, smells/tastes, touch, then sight- then the emotional feelings or atmosphere. Really experience the moment or memory fully.

What if you were to do that everyday? Eventually you would have a record of your life like none other. I've read diaries that only document the daily weather, some that are merely a collection of the weather forecast from the daily newspaper. Even that speaks volumes to the person's life. What we are doing with blogs is often just that, a documentation of the ordinary turned into something special.

Thank you Laura way out east for your wise words. :)