Happiness

Happiness, I heard someone say, lies in clear ideas of what you want, and what you can achieve? That’s one interesting point of view. It doesn’t work for me, probably because I learned that, if one person wakes up to brilliant sunshine, someone else has woken up to fog. So nothing in life is ever wholly harmonious. That’s why I think about ‘love’ and choose only to be confused by it.

The first man whoever loved surely had the thing made out of marble, tough, but prone to cracks. Being in love is something people have done for thousands of years, with varying degrees of success. It is a beautiful thing, I’d never think of it any other way.

However, there’s no doubt in my mind that falling ‘in love’ is a precarious business. It’s kind of like being in prison, except you hope and pray there’s no way out! It only ceases to be a beautiful thing if one or the other decides to chip away at what makes it beautiful in the first place.

So love can, and must be a brilliant thing, otherwise it would have been given up a very long time ago. Yet it can also be barbaric and destructive, and the surest way for one person to lose his or her identity.

Love, then, in the end, is work. It is mutual respect for the individuality of the other.

---

 

 

Mendocino, a long way from home…

I thought once I’d never get the island out of my head, that it would haunt me for the leaving. I was a boy the first time I found myself enraptured by Mull’s mystical beauty, and a man by the time I’d found the strength to leave its heart-folding shores. I might have been lost, a gypsy, more detached than the best of beggars.

Learning a new trick, a new set of rules, accepting that beauty has no single place, and that a Cimmerian shore doesn’t have to hold my heart, that life is better when damned by the rainbow, and so it was I found Mendocino. Its spell caught my heart and soul, scattering every trial of guilt. You won’t find Mendocino on the lid of a chocolate box, with snow in its streets on Christmas Eve, but a life would have to be large enough to cope with the strength and beauty of its shoreline.

Its historic town-scape, the post office, the library, the school, and the grocery store, sit alongside more modern structures that do not detract from the town’s sorrowful length of history to a man born of Vikings.  Yet the pathways, hills, bluffs that don’t bluff, or boast, but stimulate and inspire, along the winding road of adventurers. Its a bouquet of scenery quite as stunning, as aromatic, as fragile and rugged as nature designed.

Mendocino spits on my poetry, soaking into the soil, daring me to write…to feed its disgust, looking to gobble up the next syllable, sneering dissatisfaction, until my forehead is flushed with embarrassment. Mendocino…welcomes dirty jeans, dilutes stinking air surrounding sleeping homeless. I stretch out my arms, folding them around youth and erudite, water tanks, cemeteries, dirt paths, overgrown vegetation, and colorful gardens all set amidst the rocks, cliffs, ocean, at the mouth of the river. I pull its beauty in, inhaling my neighbor’s marijuana, the stranger’s city dirt, no longer broken, a gypsy, but a child still, sighing harmonica notes…with an endless desire to cry for its welcome.