dear Reader.
Isn’t reading wondrous? Words appear before us and, like the faces of dear old friends, we can’t help recognizing them. So it is with feeling glad to be human. We all recognize that wordless, joyous whoosh.
I wrote this book to remind myself—and you—how often that shapeshifting grace arises. It spirals in simple moments as we repot our plants, tackle creative projects, or tenderly hang an heirloom ornament. It spreads as we explore other cultures down the street or over the sea. It suffuses us when we witness or perform acts of beauty in the face of our common sorrows.
Our five senses, our fantastic curiosity, our exhilarating emotional capacity are just a few of our avenues to gladness. Even when headlines clamor, or life deals tough challenges, we can find numberless reasons to feel grateful and hopeful.
We humans love to discern and create patterns. It’s my hope that this book inspires you to recognize what makes you glad to be human, again and again, weaving and sharing your own brocade of joy.
Irene O’Garden
Why is it even important to be glad to be human? We may be the only species that questions gladness.
This fuchsia-tinted Alstroemeria at my side has no second thoughts about gladly and extravagantly expressing herself.
If cells weren’t glad to be cells, could they metabolize? Could they have the little cellular barnraisings that lead to the creation of petals or peanuts or pineal glands?
If atoms were ashamed of being atoms, could they even join atomic hands to make a cell for a while? They’d skip the dance and stay home. No whirling around tonight, honey. I’m just not up to making a cell. Why bother anyway? I’m not that great at doing it, and after all, cells only die, so why even make one?
Humans cannot comprehend the larger body we compose, though we can feel its organs in a symphony orchestra, a sports team, a school, a hospital, a movie set. These larger selves need us to function just as we need the beings who compose our bodies. There is great joy when these larger bodies function well, because functioning well is the nature of Nature. Of course, any cell, plant or animal will tell you the purpose of life is not function, but joy. Just ask my flamboyant Alstroemeria.
This coursing sense of connected well-being, or gladness, is the default setting of each living creature, and doubtless, the inanimates as well. (If it’s all spinning particles, is anything really inanimate?) The holographic fractal beauty of physical reality is that gladness is important to each, and each is important to all.
Hear Earth purr.
Broken crocodiles. Lizard tails. Altogether reptilian. Antediluvian. Elephant skin. Spiral. Wrinkle. Shatter. Blackened tortoiseshell. In the varying terrain of this wide petrified flow in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park, I like what lava has written.
Blasting sun above, rippled umber underfoot. Ninety degrees. On our way to Pu’u Loa, a petroglyph site, my husband and I hike baked lava trail, sanded by eight hundred short years of footfalls.
Eagerly we go.
Writing always has her challenges. For twenty-first century writers, challenges are mostly internal: psychological or time-based. Our ancestors must create both surfaces and implements before they even start to record experience.
We pick up a notebook, open a glowing screen. They slay animals, cure skins; pulp plants, layer and dry their tissues. We buy a marker, a ballpoint. They hunt and excavate pigments; gather and soak oak galls for ink; find flight feathers, cut quills. We speak a memo to a phone. They journey with smelly torches deep into caves; hike barefoot, waterless, over adamant lava fields to a place sanctified by intention.
We crumple in our tracks. We doubt the worth of our experience. We thirst for faith in personal impulse. We shame ourselves with distraction, forget what can be sanctified.
Forty thirsty minutes later, my husband and I arrive at “The Hill of Long Life,” a rise in the landscape, towheaded with tufty dried grass. A boardwalk rings an area. Fifteen thousand petroglyphs are carved below our feet. I like what the people have written.
Spirals. Dots. Targets. Lots more dots. Compelling human forms. It’s said that sailing and animal adventures are told here. But so many plum-sized dots!
An information board tells us parents traveled here in hopes of ensuring long lives for their children. Each “dot” was carved to cup an umbilical cord which was then covered with a rock. This hill shimmers with wishes.
Those who flourished returned to carve their stories, and their wishes. I love this old human impulse to inscribe, to write, to leave a mark. Whatever the challenges. I like what hope has written.
Peace.
Free Sample.
Like dust. Worse. Like rust on my desk: two or three months’ worth of unprocessed paperlife. Not bills, you understand—all the really urgent stuff got done. But filing and questions and forms. Matted, as ever, with perfect excuses: travel, performance, submissions, and family and friends.
(Not only that, but here in the Age of Distraction, we have hyper-super-ultra-extra other ways to duck and cover.)
Pussyfooting around my desk, I thought I was postponing discomfort. Truth is, I felt it every time I entered my office.
Once I faced that heap of indecision, I found two funny pockets of irrationality. First: Stern verdicts are called for: imprison things in the file cabinet or slay them in the wastebasket. Seated at last, sorting and tossing, I smiled. Silly fear, as if letting paper go is letting go of people or events. As if memory were made of paper.
But clearing the desk feels like a waste of creative time. I could be making something new! Rust eats whatever is beneath it. A desk is space for new creation.
Making space is never a waste of time, just as making time is never a waste of space.
The shadow side of our wildly entertaining Age of Distraction corrodes our Age of Satisfaction. But with a bit of inner elbow grease, we are cleared for take-off.
There’s always time if you do it now.
Near our little house in the woods runs a lovely rushy stream, Clove Creek. While it’s often brisk and prosperous, it takes a huge spring thunderstorm to understand how such a modest flow could carve out the dramatic and beautiful area known locally as The Gorge.