Find happiness in the last place you look

I’ve noticed that the news and social media do a much better job of informing me about things of which I disapprove than things I like. I can find lots of things to like, even these days, but I have to go looking for them. I’m going to share a couple of examples in hopes they inspire you to find a way to minimize gloom and doom even in the depths of winter.

I enjoy baking sourdough bread. I also like to support regenerative and restorative agriculture. Did I mention I like to eat scones made from King Arthur Flour mixes? A short while ago, King Arthur sent a notice of a new flour produced from regenerative farms. I wanted to try some but the shipping cost would have been twice the cost of the flour. Some time later, there was a different announcement: free shipping of you bought a certain dollar amount of goods. Today a box with a bunch of smaller packages of scone mixes and Irish Soda Bread mix and the flour arrived. Instead of forcing an issue, I tried to “go with the flow.”

Regeneratively-Grown Climate Blend Flour

This afternoon brought a different example involving two of my favorite activities: poetry and fly fishing. For the past several weeks I’ve been poking around the corners of the internet looking for poems about fly fishing, mostly without much success. For reasons that aren’t obvious to me, I hadn’t done a search on the web site of the Poetry Foundation until today. I need to double check my bookshelves but I think I discovered a poet (Robert Haight) whose published works look like something I want to read and don’t yet have. I’ll be surprised if any of the local libraries have a copy of any of his works, but I’ll check and, if not, add one or more titles to my list for Father’s Day and/or my birthday. Meanwhile, I’ll do some more searching and document what I find.

There’s no way I’m ever likely to become pollyannaish, but it is beginning to look as though I may have overdone the cynicism and pessimism bit. See if you like today’s poem by the aforementioned Mr. Haight. It fits the season.

How Is It That the Snow

By Robert Haight

How is it that the snow

amplifies the silence,

slathers the black bark on limbs,

heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs

to pull the berries down.

Now they are ghosts along the path,

snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.

A woodpecker on one of the trees

taps out its story,

stopping now and then in the lapse

of one white moment into another.

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