If you are happy, be happy.
Pay no mind to the men dressed / in playclothes as prophets and gods
So it’s a Tuesday night. I’m sat on my porch listening to goldfinches, starlings, cardinals, traffic, a neighbor screaming for her sibling.
No, I don’t usually sit and write or post for you on Tuesday nights. But this Tuesday, alright. I admit I’m struggling with consistency.
I admit I’m struggling with a lot of things—assignments and debts and the daily asks of motherhood. A broken cable temple on my one pair of glasses, the hair around my ears tugged and gooey in the tape that holds it together, the customer service agent who won’t write me back about a repair.
My mood is unusually tart. Occasional wisps of citrus, but mostly just claggy, sour milk. I described myself today as a “curmudgeonly old man.” It’s not quite literal, but it’s not quite wrong. I’m tired.
I took a long walk with my wife as we tend to do on mild, gold spring evenings such as this. My two-year-old in his stroller sang Paramore songs into a piece of tissue paper he fashioned into a microphone. Alex and I just talked, trying to drum up from our anxiety and exhaustion some optimism, curse’d optimism, a vision of the maybe-life we hope to one day have in a nation free from gun violence and looming, eager dread.
As we turned toward home, we passed a tree growing oddly, nearly parallel to the earth that holds it, covered in pink flowers. Not just buds, bits of color sprouting from the tips of branches like a candle burning, no. Its very bark was blooming, as though the tree itself had been made a garden. ‘Cauliflory,’ I’ve since learned, a kind of blooming common in redbuds, a tree we ourselves planted last year in our garden. I stopped and stared. I was, in that moment, I swear to god I was, content.
A poem I wrote a couple years ago came to mind as I let my body settle into happiness for a breath before we trudged on as we tend to do on mild, tired spring walks such as this. But I carried it with me as I went, in my heart and my hands, as though my own creaking stem had begun, despite itself, to flower.
I Am Happy Today
t.r.h. blue
If you are happy, be happy. Pay no mind to the men dressed in playclothes as prophets and gods, whose necks bulge with their lectures on greatness and the glory of ambition. Do not let them rob you into thinking you should want more than you want. What do they know of greatness, of glory, if they believe they speak for the divine more clearly than cardinal, than swallow, than doe leading her fawn to water, than daylily and dandelion, here so briefly, than dirt beneath your nails, than your child sat with glee upon your hip the first they see Lake Michigan? Hold on tight to your delight. If you find it in this life, you are one of the lucky. If you find it, contentedness, don’t fear to settle into it, to say with pride and peace and power, with plenty, “I am happy today.”
Thank you! I needed that poem today.
I adore this poem. It speaks to me in the same manner as Mary Oliver’s “Don’t Hesitate” poem… after all, joy was not meant to be a crumb.
I too feel your stress and despondency at the state of the world, but in the same breath I remember to soak up those little moments of awe. For me, it’s being buzzed by a hummingbird, or the sun glimmering through the trees. In those moments, I am grateful to truly be in that moment ❤️