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the question of happiness

jane got me started. jane kenyon, the poet. she’s the one who got me thinking here.

but before i bring jane into this conversation, a conversation sparked by one of her poems, this one titled simply “happiness,” i feel compelled to consider the case of happiness, the subject dragged squarely into our attention.

happiness, i fear, has been shoved to the back of the pursuit shelf (it was a founding pursuit, after all) as it seems to have taken on hallmarkian gauze. it’s blurred at the edges. and if it were a color, it might be some sort of bubblegum pink. it’s joy lite, watered down, saccharine—or so it seems, in this dark historical moment.

it might seem an out-of-reach luxury. what with bombs dropping from skies, drones the latest iteration of lethal birds. who has room for bubble-generator happiness when dread is the common denominator?

i’m going out on a ledge here: i’ll guess i’m not alone in claiming it essential, life-sustaining, worthy of our attention. it’s the active-dry yeast in our days that just might keep us from collapse. rains down out of nowhere, quite oft; dissolves just as quickly.

at simple glance, i’ll concede, it might seem, well, silly.

joy, its elder sister, worthier of pursuit, perhaps. a bit more dignity there. never mind ebullience—a whole other rainbow, happy on steroids, so happy your toes start to wiggle.

we’re talking happiness, pure and simple here.

and that’s where jane comes in. jane, the poet laureate of new hampshire when she died in 1995, at 47 of leukemia, seized that ephemeral quiver, and did the hard work that poets do: she aimed to put words to it. reached for moments that just might capture it. opened her voluminous soul to allow you, too, to peek in. to understand what she was talking about. to grasp, even for a moment, that happiness—especially in the darkest of times—will always be wafting just beyond the margins, out of sight, seemingly out of reach. and then, kaboom! in it will ride on the breeze. tickle us deep down in that joy-registering station. the one where suddenly we realize we are not alone, and not in the dark.

happiness, she makes us think, just might be mightier and more imperative than we imagine. than we’ve cheapened it to seem.

if you’re of the God-believing ilk (and i’ve made it rather clear here that i am), i wonder if that fleeting stirring of the heart or soul, that sense that for a minute there someone cranked the burner and the chemistry inside has suddenly changed, i wonder if it’s a mistake to call it merely happiness. maybe, more aptly, it’s a moment of God. maybe the God we try and try to define, to understand, to see in living color, maybe God comes sometimes in the cloak of a tickling joy, another name for plain old, pedestrian, under-sold happiness.

i wonder if, sometimes, the ineffable, ephemeral, mysterious God drops in, out of the blue, draws us into the swift-running river of radiant light, gives us a dunk, before dropping us back on the sandy bank, uncertain of what’s just happened. and all we know to call it is happiness. but really it’s more. so, so much more.

i’ll let jane take her crack at this; see if you see what she means. maybe she will convince you.

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon,
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

+ Jane Kenyon

happiness, she makes clear (rather than argues), is one of life’s glues. it’s on its own clock, plays by its own rules. it might lie in wait: ready to leap out from the geranium pot you found on the bargain shelf; lurk in the email that arrives out of the blue, the long lost college friend you’d thought had forgotten you. happiness, i know, comes in rooms filled with cancer. and just as surely drifts into the grocery store checkout line. it doesn’t seek invitation (and just as blithely ignores our most ardent invites, the times we’re down on our knees begging and pleading). happiness, often, is one short splice from the ever-after reel. extended play is not in its repertoire.

maybe its beauty, its levity comes from its uncharted choreography. it comes and it goes, all of its own accord. and it surely never stays long. but it peeks from just around the corner every once in a while. while enough to make us sense it might be out there; lurking. worthy of pursuit, after all.

happiness—fleeting, sometimes forgotten—is what keep us from crumbling. a pinch of it here, a dab there. its work is beyond proportion. not unlike salt, another life-sustaining grain, happiness, no matter how sparse, just might save us. and, surely, it’s worthy of our keenest attention.

that faint quiver of heart: be on the lookout.

it just might be God, in yet another disguise.

where do you find happiness? can you describe it?

jane kenyon dwells among my innermost circle of poets. i sat in her house once, the white clapboard house at eagle pond farm in new hampshire; swapped letters with her late great husband, the poet donald hall. her poems, pouring from the pen of a daughter of the heartland, rattle me in their stripped-bare simplicities, their unadorned arrows. she takes my breath away with lines so clear they settle forever in my vernacular: “otherwise,” “let evening come”. . .

in case you’re still here, and willing to ride along for a bit of a binge, a few things:

this marvelous short film from friends at the SALT Project, where we hear jane reading her poem, “otherwise” . . .

this link to a short bit of consideration of her most well-known poems.

and this fascinating article from Reformed Journal (self-described as “meaning open, curious, progressive, more interested in building bridges than walls, while still standing in the historical line of Christian orthodoxy”) exploring Jane’s work, where i found these few grafs worth a copy and paste:

Finding God

Jane Kenyon was born (23 May 1947) and raised in rural Ann Arbor, across the road from a working farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse for the elementary grades. She enjoyed the rural upbringing; her imagination flourished in the pastoral setting. Especially, then, her stays at Grandmother Kenyon’s large boarding house in downtown Ann Arbor posed a strange and dangerous world. At Grandmother’s boarding house, young Jane’s imagination took an unexpected turn. One day, after Jane helped Grandmother collect trash from the University of Michigan students’ rooms, they marched down to the basement incinerator. Recollecting the scene in an unfinished essay, “Childhood, When You Are in It,” Kenyon wrote, “As we worked, Grandmother talked about hell, a lake of fire, burning endlessly, or about the Second Coming of Christ, which would put an end to the world as I knew it.” Fearful thoughts for an eight-year-old child.These thoughts didn’t leave her. In her poem “Staying at Grandma’s,” Kenyon wrote:

“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”

The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh. . .the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.

Religion at Grandmother’s house was comprised of rooms full of theological horrors and restrictive rules.

Partly rebellious by nature, and partly aware of her own capacity for wrongdoing, young Jane simply went home and announced that she was done with religion forever. Her adamancy persisted while she was a student at the University of Michigan during the 1960s, but since it was a trait of that era to test all things, for good or bad, Kenyon decided to give religion one more try. She attended a Unitarian church one Sunday morning, and left convinced of the correctness of her youthful choice.

Having married poet Donald Hall in 1972, Kenyon moved in 1975 with her husband to his ancestral farm in New Hampshire. The enterprise was not without risk. Hall gave up his position and benefits as a literature professor at the University of Michigan; Kenyon gave up a lifetime tied to Ann Arbor for a new culture. Just how quickly that culture encroached upon them became evident one Sunday morning when Hall suggested they attend South Danbury Christian Church. One might call it a social obligation–friends and family would expect to see them there. Nonetheless, by Kenyon’s recollection, minister Jack Jensen, referred to Rilke, and something stirred in her. She sought advice from Jensen, and he pointed her first to the early mystics–Julian of Norwich, St. Therese, and others–then to the gospels. Soon she and Hall were involved in Bible studies. The “little rebel” as she once called herself, bowed down at the altar of the Christian Trinity.

Faith and Art

Kenyon’s Christian belief, however, would be sorely tried in the remaining years before her death on 22 April 1995 of leukemia. Bouts of acute bipolar depressive disorder that had hounded her since her youth, and then the physical toll of fighting off cancers, first of her salivary gland and then of leukemia, exacted their physical, psychological, and spiritual toll. How can one begin to understand the remarkable interplay of both the joys and trials of her life and also the crisp honesty of her art? Two things help us.

From her earliest lines, Kenyon devoted herself to the lyric poem, searching for what she called “the luminous particular.” The aim of the lyric poem is to take an event or experience of particularly impressive quality upon the poet, but to craft it with such telling detail, crisp language, and physicality of imagery that the reader feels this is his or her poem. The reader enters and owns it, rather than the poet simply declaring. The poem thus requires absolute honesty and exacting care by the poet.

the article goes on, but this is the gist i wanted to leave here, at the ol’ maple table…..

blessings on you this week….

love, bam

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May 19, 2023

jubilance and the boy who made impossible possible

My baby boy, the one they told me I’d never ever have, is graduating from a college he never thought he’d know as his own. And we are celebrating. We are jubilant. We are celebrating deep down inside both of us all those things that people say you will never ever do; but you forge right ahead and you do them anyway.

We have long thought of the kid as “the egg that wouldn’t take no for an answer.” That little egg did not care that I was 43, halfway to 45 by the time he was born. Did not care that so many other eggs had not followed instructions. That egg — his egg — refused to take no for an answer. And that egg grew and grew into the magnificent human with the very very big heart. The tenderest heart I’ve ever known. A heart that says best what it says in unpunctuated text messages, in hilarious pictures he sends of himself dressed in alligator suit, complete with spiky tail he swishes hither and yon as he stalks his native habitat.

That kid is my champion. That kid makes me believe in the impossible. That kid is living, breathing, impossible made possible.

That kid told me a few weeks ago that when he was trying to do the impossible — to reach for something well out of reach — he tapped his shoulder as if to beckon me, to give him the strength and the will and the courage he needed. Turns out, he reached what he was reaching for. And he let me in on his secret the morning after it happened. Ever since, I’ve follow his lead: when I need to reach for something beyond my reach — be it courage, or breath, or not flinching a muscle when the doctor comes at me with needles the size of a drain pipe — I now tap my shoulder too.

That kid and I might spend the rest of our lives tapping our shoulders, beckoning courage, beckoning the possible, beckoning reaching far, far beyond what we think we can do.

So I am madly wildly celebrating that kid, and the chance to be by his side when he doesn’t exactly walk across the graduation stage this weekend. Because his most recent impossible something was winning a championship along with his mates, the ones who fling frisbees into the air, and shout out in joy as they run for the discs that spin through the air, impossibly. He’s taking to frisbee fields, in the national championship, instead of seizing diploma, and I will be right there on the sideline. Jubilant. Celebrant. Waiting to see if he taps at his shoulder.

My once-impossible impossibly soaring and diving, seizing the impossible. My blue-ribbon boy. My joy and jubilance ever after…

i could sit and read jane kenyon all day any day. and this one is new to me, so i’m sharing it…

jane kenyon, a poet of the quotidian, was long and adoringly married to donald hall, the late great poet and essayist. both now gone; forever heroes to me, their poetries worthy of a lifetime’s attention. some years ago, in the blessing of one such lifetime, i sat beside hall –– on the floor tucked against his armchair –– in the living room of their white frame farmhouse on eagle pond, in new hampshire. it was during our “year of thinking sumptuously,” when we up and moved to cambridge, mass., and drank from the firehose that is the nieman fellowship for journalists. poetry was where i took my deepest dive that year. and, after that field trip to new hampshire, hall and i became something of pen pals, posting letters back and forth, letters i now save tucked between the pages of his poems. on the day we had spent at eagle pond farm, kenyon, who had been the poet laureate of new hampshire, had already died (she died at 47 in 1995), but her poetries for me are now animated by knowing the kitchen where she cooked, the desk where she wrote, and the barn where she sometimes went to weep.

here is kenyon’s “happiness”…

my jubilance: apparently, he’s been dressing up as zoo animals his whole life long. here he is, my tiger.

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October 26, 2012

it takes two months for the soul to catch up…

dispatch from 02139 (in which, after weeks of not quite belonging, something deep down inside begins to purr)….

i was riding a motor coach into new hampshire, headed up to eagle pond farm, where the great poet laureate donald hall would usher us into his ancestral white-clapboard home. where we’d poke around the old cow barn, play hide-and-seek with the shafts of late afternoon light spilling onto the cobwebs and a century’s dust. where, in the parlor, in the old house, we’d crowd around the old blue chair that slumped in all the places where hall slumped because he’s been there, by the window, looking out at the barn, at the hills, at the birds, for nearly a lifetime. and he’s 84 now.

because nothing in niemanland idles, little screens had dropped from the lid of the motor coach shortly after we’d pulled from the curb. it was a bill moyers film, a conversation with hall and his late wife, the poet jane kenyon. it was called, simply: “a life together.” and i’d watch it again.

somewhere just across the state line, kenyon, who was wise in a way that makes you pull out your pen and jot notes, was talking about how, when she’d first moved to new hampshire, into the old house filled with hall’s family’s rumblings, how for a time she felt “quite disembodied.”

then she said something that made my pen move in that way that it does when i don’t want the words to escape, to whirl down the drain of my brain, never to be fished out again.

she said, and i scribbled: “someone said that when you move it takes your soul a few weeks to catch up with you.”

[in case you, like me, want to know the rest of that thought, here’s what she said next: “and when we came here, of course, this house is so thoroughly full of don’s family, his ancestors, their belongings, their reverberations, that i — at times i felt almost annihilated by the otherness of it.”]

not long after that motor coach epiphany, another wise woman in my life, one who knows my little one quite thoroughly, she wrote a note from back home, after i’d told her about the serious case of homesick blues that had stricken the little fellow.

“it takes two months,” she declared. two months for a kid and his soul to catch up. two months to not feel, as kenyon poetically put it: “almost annihilated by the otherness of it.”

(well, it had never quite inched toward annihilation, but we all get the point.)

so, for days and weeks, as i scurried along the cobblestone sidewalks, tried hard not to trip, not to turn the wrong way, as i thoroughly drank up the otherness, i held those two thoughts in my head. columns, almost, against which i leaned.

and then i lost track.

just scribbled my lists, day after day. tried to remember to turn in my papers, read all my books. dash to the store for OJ and milk and boxes of cat litter, all those things you can’t be without.

people we love came and went. my brother, my sister (long ago, we ditched the “in-law” disclaimer), my sweet little niece. two dear dear old friends. and my mama. oh, and that boy from the college a ways down route 2.

and then, it turned into this week.

and that’s when i noticed the purring. that deep down contentment. that rare inner rumble when suddenly you take in a breath, and you feel the whole of your lungs expanding, contracting. you know, just because you do, that each and every itty-bitty balloon of your lungs is filled to the brim with pure oxygen.

you are walking along a glistening river, drinking in the endless stand of sycamore trunks, all mottled in two tones of gray, as if they’re afflicted with some sort of melanin disorder, and they can’t quite decide whether to be the color of soot or clouds on a gloomy fall day.

you are, perhaps, sitting in a cafe, sipping your peppermint tea, practically knee-to-knee with a professor who is unspooling tales of his uncanny friendship with martin luther king, jr. yes, that’s what i said: martin luther king, jr.

you are scribbling madly, because you can’t quite fathom that here you are, across the street from the very block where “love story” was filmed, where ali mcgraw and ryan o’neal romped, and you are soaking up stories of phone calls and jail cells and marching for civil rights. and you are nearly in tears when the professor, who’s been talking for more than an hour, tells you he wants to leave you with one last image, because, he says, “my kids love this one.”

so he tells you how the very last time he went to say goodbye to martin, after a trip to memphis where he, your professor, gave a big talk at martin’s request, he knocked at the motel room door. ralph abernathy, a name you might know from your history lessons, opened the door, and turned to get martin.

at this point in the story the professor explains how, after a long day of marching and fighting for rights, king and his cronies loved to shake it all off with nothing more pure than a pillow fight. they loved their pillow fights, your old professor laughs, as if he’s watching one now.

and then he gives you the image you will carry forever: so martin, he says, comes to the door, and his black head of hair is peppered with a crown of itty-bitty wisps of white feathers. a celestial vision, it seems.

martin’s last words: “till next time…”

and my professor, the one who is teaching the course on modern spiritual pioneers and religious revolutionaries, looks up across the cafe table, and says: “there was no next time. he was killed four days later.”

***

and later, on the same afternoon, after yet another divinity class in which virginia woolf’s “to the lighthouse,” was the subject of much parsing and digging, you find yourself scurrying down the cobblestone sidewalk to meet your dear friend, to ride on the T to the museum of fine arts, where no less than mary oliver — mary oliver whose words and questions and red birds and mornings have stirred you to trembles, to tears — will for an hour stand and read you — and a whole auditorium of others — a full slate of her poems.

and you will be riding the T into boston, and you will look up and drink in the mottled evening sky, as the T rumbles over the charles river. and you will hear the sound of your friend, your friend who welcomed you to the lane, back weeks ago, with a knock at the door and a tinfoil-blanketed plate of hot oatmeal cookies, and you will think to yourself, “i am purring.”

and you will remember the words of jane kenyon, and the wise woman back home who said it would take two months. and you will know, through and through, that at last your soul caught up with the rest of you.

and now it is softly at home.

in the parts of your life where you’ve up and started anew — be it a house, or a job, or a chapter of living — how long does it take, and how do you know that at last your dear soul has caught up with the rest of you? and what do you with yourself in the days and the weeks where it’s missing in action?

p.s. the snapshot above is boston’s museum of fine arts, where mary oliver was about to take to the podium, and read from her new book — “a thousand mornings” — and other poems of wonder. what i hope is that the canvas of autumn sky and the glowing face of the art hall gives you a glimpse of the feel of this week, “do come in, and make yourself quite at home….”

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May 15, 2026