Tag Archives: narcissus

Happy places

The past few days, I have been in one of my happy places: the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, where one of my Dear Ones lives. Cibola National Forest offers alpine grasslands and mostly-pine forests (juniper, pinyon, ponderosa, Douglas fir, white firs, aspen, oaks) and trails ranging from easy walks to steep climbs. Also horse trails. I stuck with the easier walks, but after just a couple days I adjusted to the altitude. Spring is just beginning up in the mountains, but lower down–at 5,500 feet–there were flowering trees and early “ephemerals” and even, in downtown Albuquerque, hollyhocks starting to bloom.

Ft. Union

This trip, we flew in to Denver to see as many Colorado friends as we could fit into 4 days (such fun!), drove I25 south alongside the Rockies, and entered NM through the high grasslands, where we saw pronghorn antelopes and wagon-wheel ruts, still evident from the days when the Santa Fe trail led travelers to bustling Fort Union. Now the place is quite empty; it’s even a Dark Skies park, but we were there in the daylight hours. I spied a nesting pair of western meadowlarks and enjoyed listening to their songs. The mountains make their own weather, and the clouds were constantly shifting and remarkable to behold as we drove down the highway. We were lucky to have timed our departure so as to miss most of the truly awful Denver-area traffic. Indeed, our drive southward on Easter Saturday was almost zen-like in its big-sky peacefulness. It helped that we had decided not to listen to the news media…

What is it about this high, dry region that has appealed to me from the first time I visited Abiquiu at age ten? As a child, it seemed the place possessed a soulful magic. I was fascinated by the mesas, hogans, adobe dwellings, twisting rivers, desert fauna. But as an adult, I’m a gardener–this is not an easy place to garden. The soft, rainy days of spring and autumn, the summer downpours I grew up with…these are not New Mexican phenomena. If I were to move to the Southwest, I’m sure I’d miss fog and mist and even drizzle, at least sometimes. I’d miss the deep, fertile soil I’ve enriched for 25 years in my truck patch (which I am currently sowing, slightly late, with spinach, lettuce, carrots, etc). Yet even though I have spent the past two days prepping and catching up on my garden, making bouquets of narcissus and hyacinth, and hearing the familiar birds of home, I recognize that this happy place is not my only happy place.

I thought recently of a letter I read written by, of all people, Martha Washington (to her friend Mercy Otis Warren), in which she says, “the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wherever we go.” She was leaving her Virginia plantation, where her grandchildren were, to go to the Capitol with her newly-elected husband.1

I don’t know that I necessarily have a cheerful disposition, but I appreciate her metaphor of the seeds we carry with us whatever our circumstances. It’s spring in eastern Pennsylvania, and there is much here to appreciate.

~

  1. Found in American Historical Curiosities, John Hay Smith, 1860 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7912/7912-h/7912-h.htm

5 good things

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes psychological research that strongly suggests human beings have stronger responses to negative events or stimuli than to positive ones. That makes sense; for survival reasons, it is “wise” to be able to recognize threats or aggression rapidly. Once humans understand this fact of our natures, however, we ought to be able to put its effects into rational perspective…if we are rational human beings.

Kahneman cites a study that looked at marriages and found that, in a marriage the spouses described as “happy,” each partner said or did five pleasant things for every one unpleasant comment or action. The five-to-one ratio turns out to be a steady one in other types of psychological research into mood, threat-response, and attitude assessments among employees, family members, and groups.

In other words, we have to do five nice things to outweigh the emotional effect of one unpleasant thing. Which is, by the way, irrational. A rational equation would be one-to-one for a neutral emotional grounding, and two nice events would (rationally) make up for one nasty remark. Philosophers would agree, but given that human nature is not as rational as we often like to believe, philosophers also readily understand the problem of what Stephen Covey has called “the emotional bank account.” That one negative situation taints our moods pretty severely, even though it should not. The emotional bank account draws down very rapidly if we consider that 5-to-1 ratio.

I propose that we learn from this research to practice five actions as we navigate the challenges of getting along with other people:

1) Try harder to do those so-called random acts of kindness. Smiling is a good start.

2) Repress at least a few of our negative markers (frowns, sarcastic remarks, resentful sighs).

3) Identify more good things people do so we realize that good things do occur.

4) Try to teach ourselves to be more rational when negative things happen.

5) Remember that others are recalling the one bad thing, just as we do, and let it go.

It’s harder than you’d think, but it isn’t impossible. Neither easy nor hard: the middle way.

Here are five good things I encountered today:

Pansies (viola × wittrockiana). Daffodils (narcissus). Chickadees (poecile atricapillus). Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 3 (1932).

daffodil photo Ann E. Michael