I can't help but feel happy. Maybe it is because I had a good night's sleep. I had another one last week. Waking up knowing that I had managed to keep just sleeping throughout the night, that the brain didn't wake up enough to make me think, that I was comfortable enough to position myself properly, and that I feel good upon waking, is something I have learnt to appreciate with age.
But there is another reason. This is my time of the year. The time around Imbolc, the more mysterious festival in the calendar, is mine. It announces the slow waking up of the earth, the gentle stir that happens quietly in the background. My birthday is approaching, too. It is the more real new year's celebration for me personally. The wheel is turning. While after Christmas and before the new year I need to hibernate, keep quiet, and celebrate the New Year only in terms of stationery, the beginning of February is the time to stretch, smell the air, be out, look at the sign of life, smile, talk.. and be happy. I am more alive than during the darkest days of winter.
This morning, I was contemplating happiness. How it isn't seen as a natural state, but something that needs to be fought for, deserved, hushed, and guarded. If you are too happy you seem too extravagant, perhaps even ungrateful. But when you think about your average days in which the weather is okay, you are managing your tasks, and are reasonably healthy, you may notice that you are actually pretty happy. Sure, you have goals and plans and ideas in your head about how much better life could be if - (insert whatever occurs). But when you think about that average normal day as it slowly closes, you might just allow yourself to see that you are indeed happy. The little moments that you almost forget are often the happiness you remember only when it is gone. Ask any parent of kids who had recently moved out or any owner of a pet that had passed over the rainbow. We don't see happiness when it seems ordinary. But the ordinary little things in our lives are happiness. They have more meaning than the big, extravagant, and rare moments.
So, with this new Imbolc and my approaching new birthday, I am very quietly happy. I have a sudden urge to start clearing out the garden and check how the little buds are doing, I want to go and find what seeds are left, get whatever is needed, and start planting, growing, and doing. I organize things and think about little projects - something to knit or sew, I want to do things with my hands. I bake and organize the kitchen. And while I busy myself like that, my head keeps plotting. Because stories want to come out, grow, and materialise just like everything else.
This year, I managed to bring my book just in time to coincide with this special time. My book family is growing, I am now the author of three full-grown, published books. I am happily working on the fourth one. The characters are quietly moving into the vacated premises of my plotting mind. Being a writer is part of me, an essential part of me. I am feeling celebratory and happy because I stopped dreaming of being a writer and had become one that not only thinks up ideas, but writes them, finishes them, edits them, improves them, and publishes them.
Sometimes, I think I see signs in the little moments. Like when earlier this week, while the teachers were striking, I walked in town with my daughter. We went to look at the display of soft toys in the toyshop. She likes the little TY toys with their names and birthdays printed on their tags and usually takes way too much time checking them out. This week, as my book was freshly out, the first toy she had shown me was called Star - the title of my new book - and her birthday was my birthday. Of course, she had to come home with us. And how can I not be happy??
