About Happiness

[Serena Duvet]

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 its 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.

[ Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness” ]

~ Painting by Vermeer