“Happiness is never grand.”
        -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

         I hear the word “happy” bounced around a lot these days. The majority of my students think “being happy” is the primary goal in life, and most of the rest think it’s one of the main goals. The internet has a lot of articles and pretty pictures and recommendations about “Doing what makes you happy” or “10 Things To Do Right Now That Will Make You Happy.” Harrumph, say I. Look at the etymology (back to etymonline.com, and down the rabbit hole we go!): from “hap,” “chance,” like haphazard or perhaps (“through chance”) or happen or mishap. To be happy is just to be lucky: it’s what you feel when you drop your phone but the screen doesn’t crack, or you hit all the green lights, or you wake up at midnight realizing you left the stove on, but the power’s gone out, too, so your house isn’t on fire. And that’s nice, but can’t we do better?
         I like “joy.” It comes from a long line of words that all mean “joy” or “to rejoice,” but might, according to my source, be related to the Old Irish guaire. Guaire means “noble.” Couldn’t we have a kind of joy like that? A joy that isn’t the result of things having happened in our favor, but that comes from something inside, something we’ve practiced, something we are? Something in the way we go into life? Disce guadere, says Seneca. Practice joy.
         That reminds me of something from the Dalai Lama. Way back when, we started out as hunter-gatherers: we went out to find what could keep us alive, and stripped its fruit or dug its roots or stuck it with a spear, and brought it home. Later we became farmers: we stayed in one place, we thought about seasons and water and soil. We grew what we needed. The Dalai Lama says that, when it comes to happiness, most of us are still hunter gatherers. We look for the girlfriend or the position or the degree or the acknowledgement that will make us happy. That kind of game is zero sum: when Natalie Portman’s with me, she’s not with you. (Natalie, if you’re reading this, Oh. My. God). But there’s another option. We could be farmers. We could plant kindness, equanimity, awareness, connection, and watch it grow into joy.
         I wonder if we latch onto happiness as a kind of last resort: when we’re not sure what to believe in, we tell ourselves we can believe in this. Whatever we think of our place in the galaxy, or of a God’s specific doctrinal love for a certain sect, Stephen Hawking says the “human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Faced with that, what else can we believe in? Well, let’s think a minute. I say kindness. I say compassion. I say connection, purpose, giggling, helping (even though it won’t help forever), striving, reaching, hurting, hoping, loving. I say now.
         Maybe even joy isn’t as high as we could reach. Maybe none of the things I just said stick for you, but could you plant some seeds, and see what grows? And see what it takes to nourish them?

         “Wednesday” comes from the Old English “wodnesdæg,” or “Woden’s day.” Woden is an older name for Odin. My source is etymonline.com, which is a wonderful resource and a rabbit hole I rather frequently go tumbling down to lands rich in silliness, surprise, and adventure.

         In Norse mythology, we’re all supported by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. At a root of the World Tree rests the Well of Wisdom, also called Mimir’s Well, as Mimir is the guardian of its waters. Odin All-Father once found his way to that well. He’d searched for a long time, for drinking its water gives knowledge of things that were, that are, and that must be. (Some things are fated, some things are for us to choose; the well only gives knowledge of what’s fated). When Odin told Mimir, the guardian, that he would drink, Mimir told him that he could. The price was his right eye. The myth doesn’t say how long Odin stood, wondering about the choice before him; but it does say that he reached up and plucked out his eye, and offered it to the water as his sacrifice, his pledge. Then he drank.
         Odin was not blind after that: he saw more than he ever had. He saw some of the patterns in living and dying, he saw something through the mists of time; he saw something of others’ hearts and minds. When he was Chieftain in Asgaard, two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, would fly out through the worlds, and return to perch on Odin’s shoulders and whisper what they’d seen. The price for seeing more was his right eye.
         I love the metaphor. In order to see more deeply, more clearly–to see something of what’s coming, to see from other’s sight; to see beyond what’s visible from our own perspective–we must be willing to give up part of our own vision. We have to stop insisting that our perspective is the only one, or the most important. We can keep our hearts, our minds; we can open them by seeing what others have seen, and learning from it. The price is simple. The price, the pledge, is one of our two eyes; the gift is a drink from the water we all share, the water that nourishes the very Tree that grows at the heart of all our worlds.
         Odin’s name means “to blow, inspire, spiritually awaken.” He was the one who blew spiritual, intellectual life into humans. Perhaps that spark, that first breath of humanity, is being willing to keep your one eye open and your mind awake while also seeing from others’ eyes.

         “Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask.” -W. H. Auden, poet

         Are we supposed to grow out of this? Because I’m not sure I have.
         I wonder if identity is never as stable as we pretend. I am lots of things: but I can’t think of anything that I finally, completely am. A teacher? Well, sure–but sometimes I have nothing to teach. A learner? I often manage it, but sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I don’t want to try. (When the spring grass is too funny between my toes, or I’m busy going down a slide). A brother, a son? Yes: but I’m far away from my family. These are centers, but they are not static. We say the moon goes around the earth, but it goes around the sun, too, and the sun goes around someplace, too. Why do we need a central point to enjoy our running?
         Perhaps we are always a flowing and a changing: more the phenomenon of the wave in the river, stable and still in its movement, than any particular particle. We are wolves hunting in the forest, and rabbits with our ears pricked up. We are rocks in the river, quiet and sure, and the water that flows easily around them, and the trees on the shore, growing toward the sky. We are teacher and learners, fathers and sons; lost and found, helping and falling, broken and whole.
         Perhaps I don’t need to only wear one mask. Perhaps that goes for you, too: we say, “I never really knew him,” or “I know the real him now,” as though there were an answer. More often I see in you so many things: a wild, endless landscape, a world I’ll never fully see, but still can listen to. I like the idea of masquerade parties: you might be this tonight. I listen, trying to hear something of who you are in your laugh. I listen, laughing with you.

“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” -Robert Frost
“The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy.”
        -a description of swainsonine poisoning in Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild

         Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, a questing young man who set out to find the wilderness, himself, and a more real way of living. His journey ended in Alaska in 1992. He starved to death, but Krakauer argues that Chris didn’t run out of food: he was poisoned by a rare mold growing on the seeds he ate. The mold stopped his metabolism from processing glycoproteins. He starved while eating.
         Some months ago, I talked about Chris’s story with a friend who is a doctor. “What a powerful metaphor,” he said. “Maybe all the illnesses I’ve seen were in part an inability to process certain nutrients.” We are hungry for so much: friendship nourishes us, as does good, hard work, and hope, and passion. But sometimes we cannot seem to eat the “food” in our community: that’s why Chris left his affluent home, and set his face to the wild.
         “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion,” says Frost. He doesn’t say the confusions will be solved: we’ll slip beyond them, because there is so much of the world to drink in. Like Chris, I sometimes struggle to find nutrition I need in the food, in the world, that is real before me. (I think it can be important to move, to find another place where you are fed; it can also be important to recognize that there’s food all around you). Like Chris I sometimes find energy in the mountains and the skies.
         Chris wrote a last entry in his journal. He must have known then that he was about to die. It’s only two words: “BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES.” He can’t have thought that the blueberries would be enough to save him. He knew about calories, and besides, that’s not what beautiful means. Beautiful just means beautiful. Whatever else was coming, he saw that. Eating he starved, but perhaps, starving, he was brilliant enough to still be fed by the gleam and the burst and the beauty of the blueberries.
         We will all die. We will all be hungry, for food or for love. And yet I know where there are creeks flowing not far away from my house.
         Drink, and be whole again. Beyond confusion.

         “Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick, you did not forget.” -Neil Gaiman

         The lines comes from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful, very small book, The Sleeper and the Spindle, which re-envisions Snow White while diving headfirst into fear and uncertainty, and turning classic gender norms upside down. Gaiman’s wonderful frolics often have a dark, haunting mood beneath (or maybe it’s above, and the joy of adventure is the foundation?), and that’s what I see in this line.
         I asked my students to try this today, to try feeling their own emotions, and after a minute of silence, most of them said it was hard. It was hard to just feel what they were feeling. Sitting here now, I realize that I didn’t do the exercise with them: I was teaching, I was leading. I told myself that was okay, but it’s hard for me, too. I spend a lot of time working. I don’t spend a lot of time just feeling, which is strange, because my heart, my me, is the foundation from which I can offer anything.
         So I’m going to try it again: a minute, or more than a minute, of just trying to feel what I feel. And I have a guide. After the exercise one of my students, a young woman whose courage and honesty frequently inspires me, said: “I feel broken. Not bad, I don’t mean bad, but–well, broken.” If my mother didn’t visit her garden for a little while, there would be a lot of brown leaves, a lot of struggling plants. Perhaps our hearts are the same way, and if we don’t go out and tend to them, there are tangles of vines and roots wanting water. Perhaps part of my heart really is just aware of broken pieces, and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that.
         We spend a lot of time holding ourselves together. No, I won’t hide behind “we:” I spend a lot of time holding myself together. And that can be good, because while being poised I get things done–but beneath the poised there are tides and volcanoes, and if I never dare go down to them, I might forget that I have magma in my heart, and all its heat to play with. There is something in us that is hotter than lies, stronger than illusions: our foundations are solid rock made molten, and while they’re strong, they need not always be stationary. Sometimes the power comes from movement and eruption; but how would we know, if we never go and see?

“The surest sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.” -Michel de Montaigne

         I have a tendency to see courage, integrity, and some other important abstracts as solemn: there stands the challenge, and here stand we. I’ve often assumed that someone who looked serious was someone who understood. Perhaps it doesn’t need to look like that. Perhaps it rarely does. I’m reminded of a moment in Richard Feynman’s biography: as part of joining a fraternity, Feynman and some other freshmen were blindfolded, taken midwinter to the middle of nowhere, and dropped off by a frozen lake. Their challenge was to find their way back to school. They started getting frustrated and scared–except one kid, Maurice Meyer. Maurice just kept laughing and joking and making puns. He was having a grand time.
         When they come to a crossroads, and everyone else was arguing about which way to go, Maurice said, “This way.” They didn’t want to listen to him; after all, he’s not even taking the situation seriously. What could he have to add? “Simple,” says Maurice. “Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires it’s going towards the central station.”
         Perhaps a true explorer’s attitude doesn’t always need to be serious. It might be a little silly. The explorer might be having a lot of fun. There might even be some bad puns. We can hold ourselves to a task by sternly insisting on it, by demanding more of ourselves, but we can also work like we played back when we were children: for the joy of it. I remember working very hard at my games back then, I remember pouring my mind into an imagined world (where I had a lightsaber!) or the building of a lego castle. Perhaps that’s why just imagining was often all the game I needed.
         There are always clues to discover, connections to make, and frozen lakes to explore. Perhaps Montaigne, behind his smile, has realized that the chance to look for those clues and walk around that frozen water, whether we’re lost or found, whether we discover something or not, is one of the greatest gifts imaginable. And it’s also just plain fun.

Acting is “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” -Sanford Meisner

         My friend Jay taught me an exercise we often do in Drama class. Each student gets a little speech. After a few days of imagining the story around it, she gives the speech on camera. Then we pause, and ask questions to tease out the story she imaged: who are you talking to? What’s happened? Where are you coming from? When the students start, they often either hold back, or “perform” to show us how talented they are. Watching that isn’t very interesting–it looks like people pretending. Something changes when we just talk about this imagined world they’re living in. They look like real people, thinking and wondering, sharing and hiding as they try to say their story. “That’s what we want,” says Jay. “That’s how an actor connects with an audience.”
         When we’re not on stage, we sometimes think that our imaginations can lead us away from the world–“stop daydreaming.” That happens, but I think imagination leads into the world far more than it leads away. Richard Feynman, the physicist, and an artist friend once had an argument about art, science, and flowers. The friend claimed that art revealed the flower’s beauty, but science destroyed it by taking the flower apart. Feynman said he could still admire the color and the shape, which were wonderful, but through study, he could also see more of the flower’s beauty. He could see how the cells interacted to create and sustain life. Except Feynman didn’t say he could “see” these things. He said “imagine.”
         The actor’s task is to imagine a world so that he has ground to stand on, and then simply stand. The task is to realize that who he is, and the emotions he’s feeling, are enough–they’re enough for a great performance (that doesn’t perform at all), and they’re enough for a real life. If he’s nervous, he can let his character be a little nervous. If he’s flustered, his character is flustered. He just has to be truthful. That’s our task, our opportunity: to connect ourselves, our emotions and our thoughts, to a world that we choose to make real.
         Sometimes our imagination brings us closer than we thought we could ever get to the beauty of a flower, the struggle of a friend, or the place our own heart is actually standing. The sun’s just come over the horizon: that’s a huge ball of nuclear fusion, burning warmth toward me across a vast, almost empty space in which we all hang, somehow safe. What a world. How real it is. And standing in a real world, when we want to connect, Meisner says to just live truthfully.

“A Song of Shattering”
         -Edna St. Vincent Millay

For you there is no song . . .
         Only the shaking
Of the voice that meant to sing; the sound of the strong
         Voice breaking.

Strange in my hand appears
         The pen, and yours broken.
There are ink and tears on the page; only the tears
         Have spoken.

         Sometimes I hear people speak honestly and beautifully about the matters closest to their hearts. And sometimes, when they speak of those things, their voices break and they start crying. The next thing they often say confuses me: they often say, “I’m sorry.” There was nothing to be sorry for.
         Millay is a beautiful singer, but she reminds us that “the sound of a strong voice breaking” is as powerful as any lyric. She is a poetic writer, and reminds us that, sometimes, our tears say everything we hoped to say, and couldn’t put to words.
         I’ve been talking recently with my brother about how we can be good parents, good siblings, good children or good friends. Millay tells me: a lot of the time, let yourself be, and then you can let yourself be where you are. Be in the sorrow, in the scream, in the tears. Be in the confusion, the moment in which you don’t know what to say or do. As long as you don’t run away, as long as you are present, you are saying something important. You are there, and your silence or your presence, your tears, or the hand you rest on a friend’s shoulder–all these things say a magnificent something.
         What if we made peace with our own broken pieces, and learned to let the tears (and the broken moments, and the connections we find even there) speak. I want to do that, but sometimes, I also worry that my tears have nothing to say. When I worry that, I try to remember the last time I held a friend while he cried. I knew how much he was saying. Can I remember that for myself?

“Oh, Francis, I wish you had some evil in you that you might know me.”
         -John Proctor in The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

         Looking around (and at myself), it seems we’re often fighting the “worst parts” of ourselves–our greed and our jealousy, our arrogance and our laziness. Perhaps fighting them isn’t a very effective choice: most things will fight back, when you attack. When I circle my mind around some characteristic to lay siege, I’m also making that characteristic the center of my mind. Perhaps there are other ways.
         It’s not just that anger and arrogance can help with some tasks, although I think they can; it’s that these emotions can always help us relate to and care for people who are also sometimes angry and arrogant. That means everyone, as far as I can tell.
         Our pains can make us close off, they can make us cruel, but they can also make us open up and be kind. We understand each others’ struggles because we struggle. We can understand when our loved ones fall short because we fall short. Our struggles and flaws can be reminders to stop and pay a little more attention to others, and they can also be the windows through which we understand a little piece of someone else’s tears or false smiles. So perhaps it’s okay to struggle. Perhaps it’s even okay to fall short. Perhaps it’s wonderful. Next time I find a part of me that feels rotten, I want to work on it, but what if I also remembered John Proctor for a moment, and said, “Thank all that is, I have some evil in me, so I can know my friends.”

Tomorrow I’ll start back to Oklahoma from California. Saying goodbye to one place, even when I’m excited to say hello to another, often leaves me feeling sad. Don’t we lose so much when we leave a place behind? Well, yes, says Richard Wilbur’s “The Sirens”–but then it says more.

I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didn’t call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me, stay.

Lands I have never seen
And shall not see, loves I will not forget
All I have missed, or slighted, or forgone
Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet
I would not walk a road without a scene.
I listen going on,
The richer for regret.

Whatever path we walk, we miss something: awake to watch the stars, we miss the sunrise. Present at one table to make a new friend, we miss another. It’s like picking a foreign language in school: at 14, how was I supposed to know which language, which culture, which entire world I wanted to try and enter? There is simply too much: too much for any of us to see, too much to drink in, too much to love, and while our heart can seek out new friends, it can’t meet all the new friends that might be. And yet–

These sights and sounds that call us away from one path are the glimmers of the world’s vastness. The promise around us (sometimes playful, sometimes poignant) is that we’ll find something when we go look. There are other things we won’t find, of course: but it would be a poor, sad world if there were only one path, only one set of views. So now, as I’m sitting in my regret (regret that the summer’s setting, that I won’t see my family for a little while; that I won’t see many of you, or the California rains when they start up) I’m trying to remember that this regret is my sense for the abounding, unending beauty of the world.

Look: here is more than we could ever dream of having, offered to us to share.