Hmmm???

What is happiness, anyway?

Is it the giddy excitement, the rattling energy in your bones you feel when everything is going just right, and you have so much to look forward to?

Is it the heartbreaking feeling that beauty leaves in your chest when you sit and watch the sun going down, golden, past layer after increasingly-blue layer of rolling hills, and you hear the peeper frogs start to sing, and the air blows warm and soft through your hair?

Is it the quiet contentment when you're home on a rainy afternoon and you have uncommitted hours stretching out in front of you, and you can sit at the kitchen table with a steaming mug of tea, a good book, and a plate of freshly-baked chocolate cookies?

Is it the deep trust that things will come 'round right in your life, that the world will keep turning, that birth and death are all one and the same, and that even when you're by yourself, you're not alone?

Is it all these things, or none? Or perhaps just a fleeting, ineffable moment, impossible to capture, impossible to pin down?

It's always confused me when people have said that they are "happy"- I've never understood how that could be characterized as a constant state. Like sadness, it seems inevitably something that comes and goes.

05/06/08: New information received today - happiness is a Texas Hot. ;-)