Happiness is as happiness does

I have been reading a piece by Rachel Richardson called "Eating disorder inspires laughs" in the Disordered Times and thinking more about the mission of my blog (if I can even call it a mission).

I intentionally chose a light-hearted title for this blog, AVIDALEGRIA, which roughly means "eager happiness." When I began, I was hoping to write about the things that make me happy at a time when my job was not going well, my father was very ill, and my husband and I were facing some difficulty decisions regarding graduate school. Facing all of these stresses, I knew that I had to have something else to look forward to -- and so I cultivated my hobbies, devoted myself to my cooking and knitting and biking and friendship, and wrote about these things, to keep them with me and remind myself of all that was good and sunny and harmonious in my life.

You probably have these things, too, these pequenas alegrias (little joys) that soothe you when you are just about run ragged by everything else in the wide world. Your comforts may not be the culinary or fiber arts; you may be scornful of these things, or merely indifferent. And yet I venture a guess that you also know where to look when the bastards get you down; you also cultivate small worlds of delight and refuge. I wonder where they are, in what corners you hide when there are too many storms about.

From now on, you'll find me here, writing and snapping photos and composing blog entries, putting together bits of text and images in order to provide a counterweight to the darker moments of life. Because we need counterweights; we need joys to stand firm against our suffering, our fatigue, our despair. This is not to ignore the darker side of things, but to recognize that in order to give them a place in our lives -- to not run away or dull ourselves to those pains -- we also need what is light and precious and immutable, joyful and urgent and sublime. We need alegrias and rose water and beech trees, sea gulls and skyscrapers and tugboats, roosters and carafes and mountains.

Amen.

Creation

I love the way this summer is turning into a season of knitting and cooking.

Even as a small child I knew that I loved to create things: I sewed wall quilts and knitted woolen mittens, drew paper-dolls and followed the American Girls Handy Book for further inspiration. It didn't trouble me then, as it sometimes does now, that most of my crafts were of a decidedly feminine nature -- that I was reproducing, in the late 20th century, the same tasks that my great-grandmother would have learned as a girl in the late 1800s.

Now, I can point to any number of theories of gender role development to explain why I was drawn to knitting and cooking instead of heavy machinery and archery; why I still take more pleasure in the so-called domestic arts, and would rather not think too much about my computer's specs or my bike's components. Yet, whatever form it takes, I know that I am following an older desire to create that women and men have equal share in. I am speaking of the pleasure in one's craft, and of the delight of adhering to a technique so well as to be able to improvise from it. I am also speaking of a sort of physical act that cannot be replicated by what I am doing here, at my screen, typing and pushing words and images around. I yearn for the tactile, the colored, the savory and fragrant. And so my knitting -- ah, fiber! -- and puttering around the kitchen here, and hikes to find wildflowers, and trips to the market.

The yellow of this lace shawl echoes the evening sunlight here in Umbria, the fuzzy bodies of bees and wasps, and the inside of the bell peppers that we stuffed for dinner the other night. Half-finished, the shawl is still caught up in its creation, still evolving and revealing itself -- not unlike this season, these days of summer's peak.

I want to dedicate this summer, half-fled, to creation in all its forms. I want to roll in the grass with pagan delight and visit old Roman temples without a tour book. I want to taste sweet new wine and discover new ways to wind a ball of yarn. I want to dance to samba music and plan long expeditions in the hills. I want to live.

Here's to summer and to yellow lace and to all of the jubilant acts of creation which the season inspires in us!

Satisfaction and satiety

Often, after a long and wonderful meal, I wish that I could just keep eating -- that fullness would never overtake me, that my hunger would last and last. But alas, my belly swells, satiety looms, and I retire for bed, satisfied and yet not so, wishing that I could have sampled another flavor or pioneered another combination of wine and food.

This is something of how I feel, too, when I look on a beautiful sunset over the ocean, or listen to Maria Callas arias, as we did in the car this afternoon, or get lost in the rhythm of my knitting or the spell of a good book. What is this desire to lose myself in such fullness, while fearing the consequent satiety? Why do I want to always leave some room left for more -- more colors, more tastes, more sunlight hours? Where does my satisfaction lie, if not in the present?

These desires for more have gotten me into trouble at times, but even when tamed, I'm not wholly ashamed of them, for they signal to something of the searcher in me, the restless malcontent who, in failing to find satisfaction in the everyday, will necessarily seek out the exotic, the inexpressible, the divine. As a result, I have learned new languages and lived in far-off places, toured the highest mountains and the ends of the earth, and come back to tell of it. I won't give up these urges for more, yet still they trouble me when my searches take on less concrete forms, and emerge as a kind of irreconcilable longing for possession and consumption at the same time -- but I can't have my cake and eat it too, I know.

The sacred appears to me as the limit to my searching: that which I cannot contain, the absolute beyond any notion of what I might consider as absolute. Against that limit, I must stop, surrender myself, and be resigned my small satisfactions. The bounds of my body, my arms gathered in meditative union, are other sites of slight contentment against the urges of the hungry mind. Sitting, breathing, my desire is not extinguished, but recognized -- and thus stilled, at least temporarily.

Last week we visited this pre-Christian temple in Perugia, pictured above: circular in form, illuminated by skylights overhead, it became a giant womb and holding-space for all my inquietudes, longings, and endless puzzling over what next. I want to keep this place within me, to preserve its still image on my computer screen and within my imagination as a refuge in hurried times. Here, if anywhere, this is just this, and enough is enough.

Amen.

The good life

Today I spent nearly the entire afternoon sitting in the shade under the wisteria arbor, listening to a LibriVox recording of Moll Flanders, knitting various pieces, and reveling in the rare opportunity to do exactly as I pleased.

Yet I know that if I let too many days pass this way -- long lunches followed by a nap and knitting -- I'll soon feel restless. The voices in my head, perhaps some remnant of Puritan duty, will scold me for enjoying myself too much, as if there should be a limit to pleasure. Should there be?-- when my pleasure consists of such simple, honest things, like books and music and fiber and food and, lastly, bicycles? Where is the wrong in these things? Where else should my duty lie, in these fallow moments, if not in seeking such pleasures, the better now than later, when more somber responsibilities might indeed call?

I began this web-log to write about the things that make me happy; to write about my avid and eager search for happiness in the face of external burdens that, at times, made life almost unbearable this spring. Yet, now relieved of some of these concerns, I feel almost guilty in taking my pleasure today, as if I only deserved it when there was real hardship in other areas of my life.

Perhaps the guilt that I feel is the only truly Puritan part of this dilemma, for ancient philosophers had something to say on the matter of happiness as well. Aristotle, for example, believed that though the end of life was happiness, happiness did not come from the possession of material goods (as is so often presumed), but from living a life of virtue, and practicing moderation in all things. This notion is sometimes referred to as "the good life," and was a principal concern of Thomas Jefferson as well, who made sure to write it into the Declaration of Independence, changing John Locke's right to "life, liberty, and property" into the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."Gautama Buddha talked more of ending suffering than of finding happiness, but what is the path to enlightenment if not a middle road between the two, another way of stating Aristotle's principle of moderation?

I already know that I am not after money or property in my pursuit of the good life. I also know that, having seen more than my share of suffering in these short 25 years, and having emerged from my sorrows mostly unscathed, I wish to help others out of theirs. But still I am searching for that "happy medium" in my own life, a way to balance the good with the bad, the joy with the pain, and to not err too much towards excess in any direction. Thus, this space, these words. Avid happiness, happy life: A V I D A L E G R I A.

Departures

Tonight is the night before the night before the day I leave for Italy.

It has been two years since I have lived abroad, and though the coming six weeks hardly measures up to my longer soujourns, I cannot think of a better way to spend my summer than among the fields and orchards of Umbria.

Italy came upon us suddenly; an offer in March finalized shortly thereafter, and at once we had our summer taken care of, long and leisurely, a throwback to childhood. Here we are, my husband and I, in the scant months before graduate school, poised between the working world and a return to being students -- and Italy has come between. Italy!

I imagine that Italy will remind me of Argentina, where so many Argentines carry around their grandparents' memories of pre-war Italy like proud badges of their europeidad, enacting their roots in Italian cultural organizations, soccer clubs, elementary schools, widows' funds, and opera performances. More than one and a half million Italians came to Argentina between 1880 and 1950, out-pacing all other immigrant groups in Argentina and leaving traces of Sicily and Sardinia in the Argentine accent, with its lilting quality uncharacteristic of the rest of Latin America, and in Argentine food, abundant in pastas and cured meats, tomato sauces and basil relish. As neo-Europeans, Argentines impose a European imaginarium on the vast stretches of the Pampa, in the same way that the architects of Buenos Aires remade the city into a European capital after Haussmann's Paris, installing broad avenues and Mansard-peaked town houses. Buenos Aires is the "balcony onto Europe," but most of all, a balcony onto Italy.

I spent one year in Argentina, in 2003, when the country was still reeling from the effects of its fantastic economic crisis in December 2001. I lived in Buenos Aires with a 70-year-old woman named after Dante's love; the child of an Italian father and a Romanian mother, Beatriz had studied opera and voice at the Teatro de Colon, Buenos Aires' most eminent theatre, and spent her dotage as a contralto in a professional choir. We spent the evenings talking of music, and listened to her old tapes of Jessye Norman and Martha Argerich while she served me polenta with tomato sofrito and regiannito cheese, the Argentine version of Parmigiano (sans the A.O.C.).

So, the clearest version of Italy that I have is the memory that an old woman in Argentina has of her father; it's an Italy that hasn't seen the television, or witnessed the return of its emigrants' children and grandchildren after the most recent crisis. It's an Italy that melds together with my impressions of Little Italy here in New York; of Verdi and Puccini and Vivaldi; of The Splendid Table; of Umberto Eco and The Name of the Rose; of Marinetti's futurismo and other manifestos of modernity.

This Italy of my imagination is kitsch crossed with nostalgia for a past that was never mine. On Friday I will see how much of the present it can contain, and whether or not it will be satisfied with its liminal and transitory role in our lives, crossroads between the post-college work years and the doctoral programs that are before us. Is this the last chance for pleasure-walks and cooking extravaganzas? The last hurrah before the candle burns low? Or merely more of what has been, and signs of goodness still to come?

I wait anxiously for my departure, to know something more of this country that already holds such a place in my narrative.

A V I D A L E G R I A

Life is tough.

As the Buddha said, life is suffering.*

I don't want to write about suffering; it may be the stuff of great art, but most of us can agree that we'd rather it stay out of our own lives, thank you very much.

Besides, people suffer in so many ways; Viktor Frankl wrote that even the smallest bit of unhappiness can cloud our entire vision, filling up our lives until we think that that is all that there is. So how can we measure suffering, if it means something so very different to the people struck by the earthquake in Sichuan, to an abandoned child in rural Massachusetts, or to an old woman who has lived with depression for 80 years? What do these forms of suffering have in common, if anything?

But I said I didn't want to write about suffering; heaven knows there's enough of it in the world without me putting in my two cents on the topic! I want to write about happiness, because happiness doesn't always catch our attention the way that sadness does, or anger, or jealousy. While these feelings come to me all too quickly, unbidden, happiness needs to be cultivated. And such work takes time, and care, and purpose.

Cultivation of anything is always purposeful; cultivating happiness requires that we know ourselves (that I know myself), and that we are attentive to our own responses and, sometimes, obey those urges towards happiness. We are beings who want to be happy; it is in our very nature to be so, whether you believe in original blessing or in Buddha nature, and yet so often we put obstacles in the way to our own happiness. My work this year has been to find the light-filled, glistening moments of happiness among the dullness of grad school applications; my 9-to-5 job; a family member's illness; and piles of scientific articles to read and comment upon -- to find those moments, and grab them tightly, noting them to myself and storing their passage in my memory so that I can, I hope, repeat them again.

Among other things, this year I've learned just how much I like to cook, to feed myself and others, and to plan new meals. I've acquired a shelf of fantastic, classic cookbooks and foodbooks: Mastering the Art of French Cooking; A New Way to Cook; The Silver Spoon; 1080 Recipes; Madhur's Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking; the last six months of Gourmet magazine; Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Sometimes I read these books before bed, slipping into an infinity of recipes that is similar to the infinity of knitting patterns that I want to make, or the countries that I want to visit, or the novels that I want to read. I want it all -- and I content myself, making do, with one recipe, one happiness, one moment.

Tonight I am going to a friend's apartment in Brooklyn, a friend who wants to learn how to cook (better), and I'm showing her how to make the wonderful garbanzo beans that my husband and I shared a few weeks ago. It's an easy recipe, and sharing it with someone else makes me happy. As I become a better cook, and more confident in my understanding of the way that food works, I like being a cooking teacher, helping another person to demystify the chemistry of the kitchen so that she, too, can eat well. This is all part of my pursuit of happiness today, these one happy moments that follow each other.

Bom apetite!




*The Buddha also said that there is an end to suffering, but that is another story. I don't think that the end of suffering -- nirvana -- is the same as a pursuit of happiness, but maybe those paths will coincide in one way or another...