THE HUMMINGBIRD AND THE HONEY

Photo by Richard Hoode (Wikimedia Commons)

Stand Still Like The Hummingbird, a collection of stories and essays by Henry Miller, remains one of the most cherished books in my library.  I don't know how long I have had my copy, which was published more than fifty years ago, but I have dipped into its profound wisdom with regularity for most of my adult life.  Some of that wisdom was quoted in Aways Merry and Bright, which I posted in 2010.  Here are some other pearls that I believe are worthy of reflection:

On happiness —

Man craves happiness here on earth, not fulfillment, not emancipation. Are they utterly deluded, then, in seeking happiness?  No, happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one's grasp.  Happiness is achieved en route . . . To make happiness a goal is to kill it in advance.

On real power —

If there is one power which man indubitably possesses—have we not had proof of it again and again?—it is the power to alter one's way of life.  It is perhaps man's only power.

 On struggle and surrender —

Struggle has its importance, but we tend to overrate it.  Harmony, serenity, [and] bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender.

On questing —

The long voyage is not an escape but a quest.  The man is seeking for a way to be of service to the world.  Toward the end he realizes what his mission in life is—"it is to be a bridge of goodwill."  Un homme de bonne volonté! 

On Taoism —

One takes up the path in order to become the path. 

On the teachings of Buddha, Lao-tzu, and Jesus —

What they tried to convey to us, these luminaries, was that there is no need for all these laws of ours, these codes and conventions, these books of learning, these armies and navies, these rockets and spaceships, these thousand and one impedimenta which weigh us down, keep us apart, and bring us sickness and death.  We need only to behave as brothers and sisters, follow our hearts not our minds, play not work, create and not add invention upon invention.  Though we realize it not, they demolished the props which sustain our world of make-believe . . .

They changed worlds, yes.  They traveled far.  But standing still.  Let us not forget that the road inward toward the source stretches as far and as deep as the road outward.

On standing still like the hummingbird, instead of "getting somewhere" —

When you find you can go neither backward nor forward . . . when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.  The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it.  The worst is not death, but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.  

Henry Miller

(1891-1980)

Have a nice weekend, everyone, 

and make sure to find some honey wherever you are.

ACCEPTANCE

Mysteriously, wonderfully, I bid farewell to what goes, I greet what comes; for what comes cannot be denied, and what goes cannot be detained.

Chuang-Tzu

The way of acceptance and spiritual freedom is found not by going somewhere but by in going, and the stage where happiness can be known is now, at this very moment, at the very place where you happen to stand.  It is in accepting fully your state of soul as it is now . . . . The point is not to accept it in order that you may pass on to a "higher" state, but to accept because acceptance in itself is that "higher" state, if such it may be called. 

                                                         Alan Watts

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every such moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Henry Miller 

MEASURES OF HAPPINESS

Let me begin my first post of the new year by declaring that this is happiness for me: a wet dog, bathed in the golden light of a late December sun, breaking through the surf and calling upon me to forget myself and return to the world of divine play.  This is where life takes place, she says, here in this moment, this tide, this light, this chance to fall in love with everything once again.  There is still an adventurous child in me—a small core that has not yet fallen prey to cynicism—and my wet dog understands this completely.

What is this thing we call "happiness," this elusive mental state that we wish for ourselves and one another on the first day of every year?  Most of us can say what happiness is not—and it's seldom what we imagined in our youth—but we still have great difficulty getting a fix on what it is.  We are in good company, of course, for the great poets and philosophers have always reminded us that happiness can never be easily defined.  It is unpredictable, elusive, fleeting in nature—and therein may lie its charm, for if one could find happiness and possess it at will, it would probably lose its essential quality of being happiness.  Perhaps Thoreau said it best:

Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

While reading some new poetry anthologies during the past few days, I have come across three poems in which happiness has been discovered in unexpected places—which, as many of us have learned, is where it is usually found.  In So Much Happiness, Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us that "happiness floats," that it "doesn't need anything," and that virtually everything "could wake up filled with possibilities." In Orkney / This Life, Andrew Greig tells us that happiness can only be found in the present reality of this life.  "This is where I want to live," declares Greig, "close to where the heart gives out, ruined, perfected . . ."  Finally, in a poem titled Happiness, Raymond Carver recalls the unexpected pleasure of simply watching two paper delivery boys on their morning rounds, an experience that left him with a profound sense that happiness is a fleeting moment of such beauty that "death and ambition, even love," are irrelevant.

Read and enjoy!  There is no better gateway to the new year—or maybe even happiness—than poetry.

SO MUCH HAPPINESS

                                                    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
                           of 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.

                                              ORKNEY / THIS LIFE
                                                      Andrew Greig


                             It is big sky and its changes,
                             the sea all round and the waters within.
                             It is the way sea and sky
                             work off each other constantly,
                             like people meeting in Alfred Street,
                             each face coming away with a hint
                             of the other's face pressed in it.
                             It is the way a week-long gale
                             ends and folk emerge to hear
                             a single bird cry way high up.


                             It is the way you lean to me
                             and the way I lean to you, as if
                             we are each other's prevailing;
                             how we connect along our shores,
                             the way we are tidal islands
                             joined for hours then inaccessible,
                             I'll go for that, and smile when I
                             pick sand off myself in the shower.
                             The way I am an island loch to you
                             when a clatter of white whoops and rises . . .


                             It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
                             the way we enter friends' houses
                             to leave what we came with, or flick
                             the kettle's switch and wait.
                             This is where I want to live,
                             close to where the heart gives out,
                             ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
                             where birds fly through instead of prayers
                             while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
                             this life this life this life.

                                                       Happiness
                                                   Raymond Carver

                             So early it's still almost dark out.

                             I'm near the window with coffee, 

                             and the usual early morning stuff

                             that passes for thought.

                             When I see the boy and his friend

                             walking up the road

                             to deliver the newspaper.

                             They wear caps and sweaters,

                             and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

                             They are so happy

                              they aren't saying anything, these boys. 

                              I think if they could, they would take

                              each other's arm.

                              It's early in the morning, 
                              and they are doing this thing together.

                              They come on, slowly.

                              The sky is taking on light,

                              though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

                              Such beauty that for a minute

                              death and ambition, even love, 

                              doesn't enter into this.

                              Happiness.  It comes on

                              unexpectedly.  And goes beyond, really,

                              any early morning talk about it.

"Everything," says Naomi Shihab Nye, can "wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept . . . "  That would include both me and my wet dog, the Zen master, especially on this New Year's Day.  What a wonderful year it's going to be!

Happy New Year to Everyone!