Eostre, Spring Equinox, Lent and the International Day of Happiness

Week 4 Lenten Project

“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.” Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Rumi

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.” Marianne Williamson

Yesterday morning, I drew “flexibility” from the Angel Cards.  The first thing that came to my mind was doing a back bend.  I haven’t done a back bend since I was 13, and that was… hmmm a long time ago.  But, the thought of doing a back bend has been on my mind.  It was one of the things I put down in my new year’s resolution.  Why?  Back bending was an item that came into my head when I was meditating on the wishes of my heart in 2015.  Crazy?  Crazy.

Mohamad Gandhi stated that happiness occurs when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.  I believe that in order for this to happen you need to be flexible.  Yesterday, my interactions with others left me with wanting to pound my head against the wall.  I wanted a project that I've been working on for six months to be done and off my desk.  However, others didn't think the same way. They wanted one more thing changed and discussed.  
After a lot of deep breathing, the only thing I could do was find humor in the situation.  I don't know if this is true for others, but it is difficult to see in the moment.     

Icing on the cake came in an e-mail my supervisor and I received on a Friday afternoon.  It was at this point I decided what I needed to do was a back bend.  Back bend modified that is.  I don't know what made me do it, but there I was bending my my body backwards over an office chair without arms or wheels.  The blood quickly rushed to my head.  I definitely saw things from a different perspective; my office space up-side-down and the ceiling.  And, it caused my supervisor and I to laugh.  The whole day we needed to just laugh.  

I think this is what spring is all about.  It is a time to step back and just laugh.  How can one not laugh, especially if you survived record level snows and polar vortex wind chills.   The yellow crocuses out in my garden they are laughing; they survived the winter months.  I think this is what Marianne Williamson meant in trying to recognize how things really are in the big picture - joyful.

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Middle English lente springtime, Lent, from Old English lencten; akin to Old High German lenzin spring

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Spring is like a perhaps hand

E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962

          III

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere) arranging

a window, into which people look (while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things, while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.