I read two poems this morning in Roger Housden's "Ten Poems to set you Free".....both dealt with happiness or joy or overflowing emotions that cannot be contained or fully described. The first was so simple, trying to give voice to the joy of the afterglow of becoming one with the one they love. The other was on being overcome with joy and not apologizing for it--IT JUST IS. (I include both poems below).

Is it simply releasing the endorphins through chocolate, sex, and exercise, or is there another explanation of where that euphoria comes from??? It is a great discipline to not get bogged down on life's daily struggle of our own from within and the world from without. I like the statement, as well as the book, 'Happiness Is A Choice!" Really? You'd never think that for so many dragging themselves around simply trying to survive, let alone thrive---and perhaps for a lot of 'good' reasons.

Perhaps a good group topic on this site: "Is happiness a choice???" If so, how do we get more of it? I'm sure there are as many 'answers' to this as there are people, but I like the truth, as the poems convey, that deep happiness flows out of loving another, as we are loved, and in 'catching that perfect prize upon the shelf' as it flutters about, and as we slow ourselves down enough to be overpowered by it.

Joy in the Journey.........Ken.
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THANK YOU, MY FATE
by Anna Swir

Great humility fills me,
great purity fills me,
I make love with my dear
as if I made love dying
as if I made love praying,
tears pour
over my arms and his arms.
I don't know whether this is joy
or sadness, I don't understand
what I feel, I'm crying,
I'm crying, it's humility
as if I were dead,
gratitude, I thank you, my fate,
I'm unworthy, how beautiful
my life.


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"SO MUCH HAPPINESS"
by Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs
or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of it's own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records....

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.