On a Good Day

Hi friends. I wrote this the other day and it softened my heart a little, and maybe it will do something in that vein for you.

Love,

Hannah

It is golden hour. I am wandering down my street that dead ends where a famous old commune used to hum with life, hidden out of sight beyond an overgrown path and a rusty fence steadied by a heavy chain. My outfit is a mishmash of comfy: cheetah print leggings, braless under a bright baggy sweater, colorful socks and patterned Chacos. The winter has been long and wet. Now, the evening is warm and the neon flowers of the sour grass beckon in the thousands. The scene is warm, honey.

A few pickup trucks lumber by, clanking along the potholed road. Some drivers slow down and offer a little wave. Some keep their gaze squarely on the road and foot on the pedal. On a good day, I am acutely aware of and compassionate towards the precise pain and beauty of all of us out here trying to make it as ourselves. On a really good day, I am in reverent wonder towards the utter aloneness (different than lonely, eh?) we each experience in grappling with living out our days precisely as us. Today is a very, very good moment, and I am doubled over with the hilarity of each of us condemned to our own particular life, and the fact that in accepting that, it would appear, we recognize ourselves as utterly free. What on earth. All is clear and warm and perfectly in step with its own essence. I keep on down the road.

Flowers popping up everywhere this season and I’m seduced and spit up all at once. Spring’s arrival energizes me extra this year, upshifts my system into higher drive. I’m whipping fast through the backroads of West County blaring Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers Guns and Money” and “Werewolves of London” with open windows, swerving into the heat. Those in the know about the stars speak of Fire Dragons and eclipses and Aries season, but seems to me it’s the onslaught that has been onslaughting since the earth formed a fiery core. Each time “Werewolves of London” comes to an end and Warren Zevon sings “I saw a werewolf drinkin’ a piña colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect,” I laugh out loud to myself. I try to listen to some podcasts, flip through the radio. But I keep coming back to the song and the Trader Vic’s perfect hair line. It’s so pristine.

I can’t get enough of this Warren Zevon line because it hits the rare sweet spot of absolutely earnest and totally unsentimental that I so admire, both in art and in a way of being. In a world of so much content, jewels like this feel like essential aids in keeping clear vision in lockstep with humor. Too earnest and things become weighty and lacking in the cosmic giggle that keeps the whole game fun and cheeky. Not enough earnest and we’re in a hell realm of apathy and hardened hearts.

That sweet spot looks easy but is hard won, seldom achieved. Online and on substack many people write many things. I scroll through with every attempt at an earnest heart, also aware of my tendency to brace. My algorithm is a wind tunnel of words from thoughtful, good people trying to devise thoughtful, good systems for implementing lessons gleaned from hard earned self awareness, transmuting them into regenerative projects and restorative practices and earnest attempts at sense making “this moment.” Eros this that and the other seems like the hot tagline of the moment. Which I’m all for, but it never lands right if the earnest balance is off. There are also the teachings of elders who have taken the path a little further, leapt off the cliff of letting go of themselves, who offer the less sexy but deeply nutritive lens of grounding in simple here, the body, the earth. I am both bemused and respectful of my desire to contribute to the chorus. I, too, wield an earnest baton. Maybe it is our very ticket to freedom to just keep at what we care about by rearranging the words. Given that our deepest prayer is really just to know ourselves.

I do believe that everyone and everything actually wants to know themselves even if oftentimes that desire is deeply clouded over and manifests in myriad distorted and terrible ways. Onward down the road we go.

A few days before my golden hour venture, I wander down a street in the neighborhood I’ve newly discovered. Halfway down I encounter an excitable black lab, pudgy as she outgrows her baby fat. She follows me down the street to where we encounter three sheep on the other side of a fence. The lab charges the sheep and the sheep recoil and the lab barks and I depart the scene, loafing my way down the lane through the sweetgrass and past the chickens doing chicken activities. When I double back I encounter a very different scene than I’d left. The dog and the sheep, behold, are kissing! Through the wire fence the sheep have lined up with their noses pressed together, and the dog is licking each of their faces. I laugh out loud, delighted. I kiss the dog too. The dog kisses me. I kiss the sheep. The sheep don’t exactly kiss me but they move their heads up and down and consent to my fingers wound into their pelts.

Ah, I say to myself. Ah, this is it. This moment is as good as any moment. No substance I have ever taken has surpassed this kind of ecstasy.

Ecstasy comes and goes. A few days later I am grumpy and in a mind loop and text friends for support with some challenging dynamics regarding mundanity with human relationships. One responds, “Interesting that you were enveloped in such joy with the simple silence and being-ness with the sheep, but it seems harder when it comes to other humans.” Bull’s-Eye. That’s a golden reflection. On a good day, my awareness softens to let other beings point out where I’m complicating the matter. Good days become less dependent on the happy metric and more about seeing through the clouds.

A few weeks later I am back on the sheep street. Approaching, I see the extra wooly black and white one resting in a patch of sunlight. There’s a flash of fluff out of seemingly nowhere, and I recognize a newborn lamb has darted out from behind her. In an instant, I am in tears. The world is made utterly strange and fresh by just how recognizable it is. The obviousness of this baby’s arrival (spring and lambs! birthing animals! flowers! ) is immediate. But I wasn’t expecting it. I have the sense that, in kissing the sheep a few weeks ago, I was blessing something not yet born. Something I didn’t even know or consider was gestating.

The lamb rambles back to mama, breathing fast, a ball of fluff changing shape and size with every quick move of the lungs. The mama sits, chewing her cud, the small weight of her baby pressed against her, self-contented in the sun.

It’s spring and each day I pray I wake up another day to do things like kiss the sheep and do my best to praise all of nature’s creations and kick around some balls in my mind in the attempt to place everything squarely in the light. Or better yet, to recognize it all as the very same stuff of the light itself. I want that for me and for everyone.

On a good day, it all feels possible.