Happiness

In America, we have institutionalized the pursuit of happiness by making it part of our constitution. Many think – I know I did - that we are entitled to be happy, and that if things were a little closer to perfect, we would be happy. I saw the fallacy of that meme long ago. My first awareness that things are not close to perfect out there in the big world, in fact they aren’t even perfect in here in my little world, came early. I observed that I felt happy at times and not happy at other times. I tried to understand why this was. What exactly was it that made me happy? Since the answer was different in different contexts, it wasn’t easy to discover. After trying lots of different things, I began to believe that happiness was like a butterfly that lands in your garden for no reason and then moves on drifting on the wind, ephemeral and elusive.

I read the philosophers and poets, novels, ancient tomes and all the popular media articles I could find. I even consulted psychiatrists who make it their living to study the human mind. I read many of their studies. I decided that they aren’t very interested in happiness. They are interested in why people are not happy. They concentrated on sicknesses of the mind. Their assumption was that the natural state of the mind should be happiness, so if happiness doesn’t exist, then it must be due to sickness – some sort of malfunction. The more I pursued happiness the farther away it seemed to fly. I began to think that happiness wasn’t even as solid as a butterfly drifting on the wind. I began to think it was a myth. Finally, I gave up looking for it. I thought I was doomed to always feel unsatisfied, and unhappy. Other people seemed to be happy – why couldn’t I? I sat back and waited for the times when happiness would fly into my life. I became extremely bored and began to look around for things to distract my mind.

I decided to do things that interested me, and do things that brought me peace and comfort. I planted a big garden. I spent time there. I planted flowers known to attract butterflies, and eventually, butterflies came. I watched them in the morning sun and thought about happiness flying into my life. I thought – I wasn’t sure – but I thought that maybe this was a happy place. I visited my garden a lot. I decided that if I couldn’t be happy myself, then I would create a place where butterflies would come and I could watch them being happy. I decided one day that eating solitary meals didn’t mean that they had to be boring meals, so I hauled out the cookbooks and watched the food channel and began to cook myself wonderful meals – things I love to eat. I had a lot of leftovers, so I began to invite people to eat with me. I picked people that seemed hungry, people that seemed lonely and people who wouldn’t get a regular home cooked meal very often. Soon, there were people in my home, and I wasn’t lonely any more. I watched them eating and enjoying the food. I watched them looking happy. I always spent a lot of time with my horses. They are my psychiatrists. I talk to them and they listen and do not judge me. I invited people who couldn’t own a horse of their own to come to work with me, and with my horses. I watched them as they lived a dream. I watched them being happy. I so wanted a special friend – someone to replace my lost soul-mate, someone to share my life with, but, no matter how I looked, I didn’t find anyone, so, I bought a golden retriever puppy. I played with him and threw the ball and watched him being happy. I let him sleep on the foot of my bed when he cried at night. We cried together.

I continued to read about happiness. One day I discovered “A Course in Miracles” I decided to read it carefully and follow what it said – just as an exercise to keep my mind busy. I wasn’t looking for God. I was looking for the answer to the question why wasn’t I happy? I don’t recommend this book to everyone. You need to have a certain mind-set to appreciate what it teaches. I noticed that I felt less unhappy. I wouldn’t say I was happy, but there were moments. I tried to understand those moments. What made me happy? I finally decided that happiness isn’t ‘out there’ to be found. It lives inside me. Then, I discovered Doctor Marty Seligman’s book “Authentic Happiness”. It seemed to be the final piece – until I found Level-3, and Richard Brodie’s book “Getting Past OK”. Now, I understand that happiness is my own creation. I create my happiness. It doesn’t come to me like a butterfly in my garden. It comes to me because I plant flowers that attract butterflies.

Love.
Glee

Anyone Home?

September 8, 2007

Hi, folks – Yep, I’m home – busy canning tomatoes. Today is tomato sauce day. Tomorrow will be salsa, then marinara sauce. The tomatoes are beautiful this year. Next week is sauerkraut. The cabbages are cheaper now as the harvest is underway. Murphy makes it and I process it when it’s done fermenting. It is wonderful. I had trouble finding canning lids for some reason. The shelves were almost empty of them. I bought the last five boxes at Martins Hardware and I’ll go see if South Lyon Lumber has more today. I froze several gallon size bags of green beans last month. We ate all the peas. I can’t seem to plant enough peas - also asparagus. We ate almost all of it. I froze a little, but I prefer the fresh. The leeks are huge! I need an armed guard to go into the garden with me to pull them. One is enough for a big pot of stew. I found three big pumpkins on the old manure pile. I picked off all the blooms on the plants so they will concentrate on just one pumpkin. I think I may get a pretty big one. Summer squash are coming in every day. I love them fried with a little olive oil and garlic. The zucchini is recovering. It got stepped on by the neighbor’s horses that day when they all got loose. Why is it they are drawn to the garden? There is only one plant left. There is almost never a shortage of zucchini, but this year there is. The peppers crashed, the carrots and beets got taken over during the rainy time by weeds. There may be a few in there, but I doubt it. There are no pears at all. The pear tree was in bloom when we had that late freeze. The buds were all killed off. The apple tree was felled by the same storm. It was over 200 years old and rotten in the center. I knew it would fall one day, but it was still a sad day. I may go pick some raspberries to make sauce for ice cream and smoothies. Later after the frost, I will get some apples and can them. I like to have jars of home canned foods on the shelf. Also, there will be no additives . . .

I smell tomatoes cooking. I better check to be sure the sauce doesn’t scorch . . . OK I’m back. It’s doing fine. Another hour or so and it will be ready to cool so I can press it through the sieve. The seeds make it bitter.

We (my son and I) put up hay last week. My barn is stuffed and he sold what little there was extra to the neighbors. People were driving up the driveway looking for hay. We could have sold several hundred more bales if there had been any to sell. The harvest is meager because we had a drought for almost the entire month of July. It wasn’t very tall, but it is beautiful. My horses love it. The front pasture is nearly all grazed over. I need to move the horses onto the winter pasture about 2 months early. That means there will be a shortage of forage for them about November. By then the grass will not be growing. I will have to pull them off of the fields early so that means that we will feed more hay than usual this year. Watch beef prices. There was a drought in the mid-west and the cattle men will be making those same decisions about their cattle - what to keep and what to sell. Fuel prices have pushed the cost of feed up. Everything will have to be trucked in. They will have to decide whether to profit from the higher prices which will not mean more money to them because of higher costs, or to cull their herds down to the best ones. I think there will be a sell-off which could bring prices down for a very brief period before they climb even higher.

I need to stay near the kitchen as my sauce thickens, so – I’ll be back later . . . hmm it seems to me I have rattled on a bit. I have been off work for one week. I think I may have a chat deficiency.

Glee

What Does This Mean?

I was taught long ago that you never start a letter with the pronoun "I". You should write at least three sentences first in which "I" does not appear, the pronoun "you" being the preferred opener. Obviously the lesson didn't take. I try to start out "It was good to hear from you . ." or "You have been in my thoughts lately . . ." something like that. Not this time. This email is about me, my favorite subject, so I thought it was OK to start out with "I". That way anyone not interested can hit the delete key and move on in their life.

I have this brain that I call "my Great Brain". I picked that term up from a character in a series of short stories about a mischievous boy who was the leader of a back-yard gang of kids. I wish I could remember the name of it. I am accustomed to giving it - my own Great Brain -an instruction and in a little while it always comes up with a solution - an answer to my dilemma.

I say to my Great Brain "Great Brain I have this problem . . . how am I going to deal with it?" Then I turn off the light roll over in my bed and go to sleep confident that in the morning all will be clear. It never fails - almost never. What does it mean when, in the morning, I check in with my "Great Brain" and there is nothing there? It's a blank. No reply at all. It's like looking into the magic eight ball, shaking it hard, and no answer even an inappropriate one floats to the surface. What does this mean?

Sigh! It's such a hard thing to make an important decision without that feeling
of certainty that always comes when My Great Brain has given me "the" answer.

Perhaps the answer is - do nothing, so "nothing" is what comes up ? ?? ?

I'm going to have to sleep on this.

What Do Cats Know About Love?

This is a tiny chapter in my memoirs. You can comment on it if you would like to. I am particularly interested to hear if it makes any sense to you at all. Do I lose you in this convoluted musing about love?



What Do Cats Know About love?
By
Glee Bohanon

I wished for kittens, and they came to me. In my universe whenever I wish for a thing, it comes to me. I live in the expectant state that whatever I need is on its way, as in the Native American spirit dance “Horses are coming”. This time, it was kittens. All horse barns should have some cats – you know – for rodent control. The last of my cats was blind in one eye, rail thin, and spent sunshiny days staring at dark spots in the lawn. She was about 16 or 17 years old. I figured she deserved a warm spot by the fire at this stage of her life. She chose the neighbor’s hearth instead of mine; me who had cared for her and fed her all these years was rejected. I felt betrayed by an old cat suffering with dementia so bad she didn’t remember where she lived anymore. My neighbor took in that old, demented cat who wasn’t even hers. She bought soft food for her. She let her choose a warm place to sleep. She worried about her, and petted her when the cat allowed it. I was a little jealous of my neighbor who had a cat and I didn’t, and a lover, and I didn’t.

I hadn’t seen Kitty Kat for a day or two. Mary and I met in the driveway we share and I casually said “Have you seen Kitty Kat lately”?

Mary’s eyebrows pinched together “No, I haven’t. I hope she’s alright.”

“Me, too” I said.

Murphy, who always says he doesn’t like quadrupeds, was on his way back from the mail box. He said “I saw her prowling in the pasture. Here’s your mail.” He handed me some envelopes as he walked past us. He disappeared around the corner. A moment later, I heard the door to his apartment slam shut. Mary hurried off, and I was left there in the middle of the driveway, kitten-less.

One day the blacksmith came, and I mentioned to him that I wanted some kittens. I have had a crush on my blacksmith from the first day I met him about 30 years ago. He was married then, and so was I. We never mentioned this attraction, it wouldn’t be a good thing, but I think we both felt it. His wife died about five years before my Ed did. I still find Ron attractive, and I think he and I are friends. That’s all it will ever be, me, a client, and him, the blacksmith. He moved on in his life. He has a live-in girlfriend. Priscilla is a horse trainer. They have a big barn full of horses, Jack Russell terriers, and cats. There are so many cats there because Priscilla either can’t afford to get them neutered, or doesn’t want to. I think it’s the latter. I think she loves the perpetual batches of kittens. I think they are replacements for all the children she never had. She worries over them like she does over everything under her care. They get a warm box in the tack room when the mother cat doesn’t hide them where no-one can find them. They get food, and lots of petting, but that’s it. There is no money for medicine or shots. The kittens often don’t survive the rough environment of a commercial stable filled with more than thirty horses.

Ron said “Come on over and pick some out. We always have some extras.” We both laughed.

I said I would but I never found the time to go.

About six weeks later, it was time for the horses to get new shoes so I called Ron as I have been doing for thirty years, and left the message on his answering machine. I didn’t mention anything about kittens, just the usual thing about shoes for horses. He came on Saturday morning. I looked out my window and there his truck was out by the barn. I hurried out, and caught him up a horse. I put it in the cross-ties and he bent over to pick up a hoof. It was then that I noticed the wire chicken cage. There were three kittens in it huddled together in a corner, a grey one, a yellow one, and a white and orange one. Their eyes were too large for their heads. Their hair stood straight out. They didn’t weigh as much as my empty coffee mug and weren’t any bigger than that, either.

Ron said “I didn’t know which one you would like, so I brought you three to choose from. They’re all from the same litter.” There was a laugh hidden in his voice, and his bright blues eyes sparkled. When he left, I had three kittens. “Three little kittens, they lost their mittens” was all that I could think of. Ron brought me three little kittens. I thought it was a small token of love, three mewing balls of fur needing care and attention.

When Murphy saw the kittens he grumbled “Just what we need.” It sounded cynical and sarcastic.

I was a little miffed about his surly attitude. I said “would you get me the big dog cage from the basement? I want to set them up out here in the barn. They are barn cats. This will be their home. They’ll grow up and hunt mice and rats and such and keep rodents out of the barn.”

He allowed that perhaps they would have a practical use. He reminded me that he doesn’t like quadrupeds. He thought Billy, the golden retriever, was at least somewhat intelligent, but cats, well don’t expect him to care about cats. I said I didn’t care what he thought about cats. They were my cats not his. He brought the cage. I put it in an empty horse stall where it would be out of the way. I could shut the stall door, and the dogs wouldn’t be able to terrorize the kittens. I wanted them to grow up brave and bold. You raise bold kittens by never letting them feel fearful. I put some water, an old dish pan filled with sawdust and a pile of old towels in the cage.

I said to Murphy “I need to go shopping and get litter and proper kitten food. I wasn’t expecting kittens today.”

“Suit yourself.” He said - or something. I couldn’t quite make it out. He grumbled it as he stalked out of the barn.

Over the next few days it became evident that the kittens were much younger than Ron thought they were. They could barely eat the dry food I had bought them. They were so light I thought that a good wind would carry them away like dandelion seeds. They wobbled when they tried to walk. They were infested with fleas and their ears had some ugly gunk in them. One of them had a nasty case of diarrhea and his bottom was raw. Murphy said he would take them out and drown them for me. I was horrified. I took them all to the cat vet. An hour later, I brought them back armed with ear medicine, worming solution and antibiotics. The orange and yellow one had a parasite that eats the lining of its intestine. It was doubtful he would survive. I had to catch each feral kitten three times a day and clean their ears and give them their medicines. I had to medicate all of them since the parasite is very contagious. The kittens did not appreciate my efforts. I tried several things, but I could not hold the squirming kitten and get the medicine down his throat. I asked Murphy to come out to the barn to help me catch them and to hold them while I gave them their medicine. They hissed and spat using their razor sharp claws and teeth as if in the fight of their lives. Murphy was better at catching them than I was. He stalked each one deftly – since they had learned how to squirm out of the cage, and hid all over the barn. He caught each one, wrapped it in a towel and cradled it in his arms. He complained the whole time and the kitten struggled to escape while I cleaned its ears and gave it medicine with a syringe.

The whole time Murphy grumbled “I don’t like quadrupeds. I don’t know why any one would want a cat, never mind three of them.”

I said “My barn feels empty without some cats in it, and besides, they catch rodents.”

When we were finished he stalked away to his apartment and slammed the door.

Each morning and night without fail he fed the horses and brought them carrots. He took my dog for walks and threw the ball for him, and he came downstairs unbidden when it was time to give the kittens their medicine.

Murphy said he did not love me and never would. I looked at his face as he ministered to my pets - pets he said he didn’t like, and I knew. Love comes in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s three little kittens in a chicken cage, or a golden Retriever, or a drunken Irish poet who holds your kittens with tender hands even when he says he doesn’t like them.