The Secret to Happiness

Bonjour! What a beautiful sunny morning. The birds are singing loudly. The bees are buzzing in the flowering tree outside the kitchen windows; a thick layer of pollen covers the driveway below them. The roses are blooming, and close-by the raspberries and figs are ripening. The grape vine I planted last month is stretching out its new, grasping tendrils.

Blanche is out in her green pasture munching grass. The cats haven’t made an appearance yet. My husband is in bed drinking the coffee I brought him and reading a book. The four teenagers sleep soundly. Peace will reign until they wake up at noon. After I’m done with this writing, I’ll go out and clean the rabbit cage. All is bliss.

Yesterday, I finished hand stitching a large tablecloth. I also went into town and purchased some material with which to sew a quilt. I wanted to purchase two large pieces to quilt together: a simple project. But the woman shopkeeper only sells material for what the French women call “patchwork,” the sewing together of small pieces of material. So she didn’t have enough material for me to buy large pieces for my simple project. A month ago, I had fallen in love with a green and pink paisley. For the past four weeks, this material kept creeping back into my thoughts, but since I had more than enough projects to finish, I didn’t purchase the material. I didn’t have the desire to spend the time to piece together little scraps of material. Patchwork seemed like a good winter project, something to do when it was raining and you couldn’t go outside and work on the garden or walk with the sheep. I only wanted to make a quilt out of this material to which I was attracted. However, after making the trip to the store, and looking at the other attractive choices of materials, I decided I’d give “patchwork” a try. I’ll report back on my progress. I sat up until Midnight cutting the squares. I expect I’ll finish the quilt in ten years.

I enjoy sewing by hand. When I was in the fourth grade, the neighbor girl and I had a business making Barbie Doll clothes from her mother’s sewing scraps. We earned about twenty dollars a week to split between the two of us. That was a lot of money in 1967 for 9-year-olds. I have very fond memories of sitting with my girlfriend on the weekends and sewing clothes by hand. I was thinking yesterday about the old five-and-dime where we would buy our miniature snaps and hooks and buttons. To this day, I am attracted to fabrics and sewing notions and even if I’m not sewing something, I like to wander about fabric shops just to look, just to smell the heady scent of the sizing on the material.

I’ve often tried to meditate and have found it to be impossible for me. However, when I sew by hand, I believe that I come awfully close to the perfect Zen state of mind. My mind is emptied of all worldly cares, yet I’m producing something of value.

While I was sewing the tablecloth, I would often take a laundry basket outside to keep the material off of the ground and I would sit by Blanche while I stitched. I had to sit on the opposite side of the fence because she likes to chew on fabrics. She didn’t like this arrangement at first and would stick her head through the wire fence as far as she could and baaaa at me. She came to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to join her on her side of the fence and I wasn’t going to let her out to join me on my side. She finally decided it was best to lie down pushing against the fence, as close as she could get to me, and chew her cud. Now that’s the true definition of “bucolic:” a woman sewing by hand with her sheep lying nearby chewing its cud.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was making the final turn around the very long tablecloth with my needle, I sat in the living room on the old discarded sofa my girlfriend gave me, and my husband sat in one of the old stuffed and fringed chairs that I fell in love with and purchased at a local antique dealer’s. My husband reminded me that I had purchased the material I was sewing about seven years ago. He found it amusing that I had finally decided to make something out of it. (It’s the same material that I made the kitchen curtains out of, the ones that led to the busted water pipe.)We sat there with no television (we don’t have one here), no radio, no cars, no intrusion from the outside world, and discussed our life and what it’s been and what we’d like it to be. We weren’t hurried or impatient as we usually are when we talk in the U.S., when we’re overwhelmed with his work and my work. I think that one of the best gifts a woman can have in life, besides not having her children in jail, is to have a husband who has the same desires and aspirations in life. And that I have been given that gift.

When I was younger, I had so many “goals” and “objectives” none of which, thankfully, came to pass because none of they would have pleased me. (Except for finding someone to love and be loved by.) All my material and career goals were fueled by the external world. They weren’t the real expression of me. And so I flitted from one thing to another, not able to pay attention to any one thing because it all bored me. I don’t understand modern, corporate society, and living on this farm is my admission of that fact.

I look back and see my entire life as a struggle against what the world was telling me I should want, and what my soul was trying desperately to make clear to me. I had to destroy a lot of mental flotsam, which only happened when I followed the two sheep into the woods here and realized that what I really wanted was what I already possessed: a farm to roam, sheep, a rabbit, a husband and son to love, and something to sew.

I’ve also learned a lot by observing my French neighbors. They live frugal lives, they raise their own food, and they are the happiest people I’ve ever met. They have taught me that happiness is found in simplicity. All you need is someone to laugh with, a bottle of wine, a good loaf of bread, and a chunk of strong cheese. Everything else is just useless clutter in your life that requires dusting, insurance, taxes, or worrying.

Last night, at midnight, I was standing over my bed, I had turned the bedside light on so that it was dim and wouldn’t disturb my husband who had gone to bed at ten after a long day of wrestling with irrigation pipes, sorting roofing tiles, and sorting heavy discarded junk. I felt a great pleasure in seeing him curled up in bed sleeping soundly. The teenagers were downstairs laughing and drinking hot chocolate while painting a wall with a graffiti design. My bedroom floor was covered with books and clothes and shoes and my husband’s suitcases. Spider webs hung from the corners. The nightstands were covered in a fine layer of dust. I stood there, and this intense feeling of peace washed over me, and I understood the perfection of that moment. I understood the perfection in all the imperfection. My bedroom didn’t look like a Martha Stewart K-Mart ad. I wasn’t coming to bed looking like a Victoria Secret’s model; I was wearing my husband’s white t-shirt and some light sweats he had bought at Costco. My French house didn’t have the tower I had always dreamed of, and the attic above my head was filled with dead rats, dead flies, piles of old dusty rotting magazines, and the roof most likely had a leak in it which we’ll discover in due time. But I was so overcome with the beauty of the moment I wanted time to stop. I wanted to be frozen together forever in that beautiful moment. . . healthy, happy, contented. There wasn’t anything more I desired than what was contained in that moment.

The perfection of this morning overwhelms me with sadness, as I realize that as I’ve been hurtling towards my inevitable grave, and I haven’t had the vaguest clue about what really matters in life. I’m just starting to peel off the societal/materialistic garbage that has been smothering my soul and as I do so I’m beginning to see tiny glimpses of Valhalla/Heaven/Nirvana/Bliss.

I’m off to find my bliss . . . it’s waiting for me in the rabbit cage I’m about to clean.