What's  in a   good soup? Love, laughter,  good friends!

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A Crow named Jerry

Jerry was our pet crow. Actually, there were two of them, Tom and Jerry. My brothers had found them pitifully peeping after their nest was knocked from tree. (They never admitted to deliberately knocking it from the tree, but...)  They brought them home to mom to see if they could be returned to their mommy crow.  

Jerry the Crow ~ Absurd Bird

Entree

Spring to Joy

~ VERLYN KLINKENBORG

You know what happens next. Spring comes at last. It makes a terrible story, because we've heard it so often, and yet it's the very best story any of us know, always worth repeating. Last week, the pasture in front of our house greened up. And everything greened up with it, including my wife and me. The pasture grasses reasserted their ascendancy. They climbed out of the dead thatch, through the overlay of dead leaves, and took on the color of hope itself. The earth seemed to blush green. You could practically smell the photosynthesis. All the early markers of spring had come and gone: the snowdrops, the aconites, the sap lines where the neighbors collect sugar maple sap. No more markers. This was spring itself.

I turned the horses into the pasture after checking the fences. The horses trotted through the gate with the high-headed carriage they use when advancing into new ground, breasting the world around them, so to speak. Then they ran. What matters is how they ran. First they ran leaping and kicking. Then they circled back around and lowered themselves into a flying hand gallop, almost squatting down as they stretched out to speed, clods flying from their hooves. The horses stopped and bounced straight upward, all four feet in the air, the way a fox does when it pounces on a vole. They half-reared and feinted, pirouetted and bucked, rolled once or twice. And then suddenly it was over. Remedy, the retired cutting horse, stood at the southwest fence line and sighed at the neighbor's horses across the road. Nell and Ida began to graze on the new grass. In a moment they lay flat out on their sides, basking in the sun, stone-dead, to all appearances.

Lindy and I stood at the fence, watching the horses turn into their emotions. As much as we admire the rationality of horses ? the quality that allows us to ride them ? we admire just as much the way they come unhinged with something that has to be called joy. There are days when it feels as if we humans carry our bodies around with us, separate, confusing, demanding, the distant province of our being. But spring brings those days when humans can almost emulate the horses, when the body acts on its own thought, which it receives directly from the sun bearing down, the grass bearing up, the whole surface of place itself coming to life again.

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What shape has your joy taken?  Or have you not taken it??  

Why NOT? 

Posted: Apr. 26, 2003

How to Make Yourself Happier - In 1986, L. Ron Hubbard wrote a poem which is a guide to happiness.
 
The Joy of Creating
"Force yourself to smile and you’ll soon stop frowning. .

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Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, filling it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

 ~  Joseph Addison

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