practice 'Happiness Manifesto' daily

Today I flew like a bird across oceans. I saw turtles and dugongs and sharks. When we landed I stood in the water of a tiny island in the most remote part of earth, an island that is volcanic with red fertile soil and seas that are filled with life, and two bull rays came up and their wings, undulating against the currents were lifted and revealing the pink and grey spots underneath. They were so tender, raising one eye out of the water and blinking by way of hello.

My blessings belie comprehension they are so wide.

Oh how blessed! In this beautiful country, with the melody of my guitar drifting across the air in sweet wafts like honey, as the sun casts long shadows across the sea.

How I wish I could show you the colours. The blue of the evening ocean, the mauve of the sky. The coconut tree is so green and and has dropped all its dead fruit to the ground. The poncia blooms orange and red. And in the creek opposite a tree is blooming. Its flowers are bright yellow, canary really, and have great masses of petals like a horses tail that droop down and sway in the wind.

And then against the sky a flock of sulphur crested cockatoos arc and swoop, cawing and making so much noise, and I am reminded that this is my home.

I am not just blessed. I am encapsulated by blessings of the richest order and kind.

Today there was a black child in a white coffin on the footpath. His mother was marked in the way that the poor are marked. She was a little too thin and a little too grubby, and the child had died as his lungs slowly filled with tuberculosis.

The child’s mother looked at my foot in the aisle of the bus on which she travelled with the dead child, the bus to the airstip in this remote part of our land, from where she would return to New Guinea.

My foot was white and clean with five perfect toes and pink moon nails that are clipped very short. It had no callouses and was neatly contained in a leather sandal. The sandal was silvery brown. She looked at my foot and was so intrigued by this white foot. What might it be like to live in my shoes?

I looked at her, wished her blessings with all of my heart, and thought about how numerous mine are.

This morning my practice was clear and smooth. I stood on my head, legs as wide as the sky, and my toes streched far beyond the ceiling. Afterwards there was perfect stillness. The cicadas drummed outside, promising the day would be hot. The water was smooth as glass. There is no wind this time of year. A fly buzzed overhead, and even that was perfect. J slumbered in a nearby room, hot, tangled up in the single sheet that we now kick off in the night. Today I am blessed.

Today I was walking down stairs. What poise and balance and grace it takes, what a finely tuned machine to balance over precarious edges and eke one’s way down stair cases.

To be able to walk down stairs is a miracle. For this alone I am blessed.

Where to start with blessings. I am showered with them! From roof tops and the highest branch of blossom trees they are shaken loose, hovering in gusts of wind and curling round my ear lobes. They are beautiful, pink and green and bright, swamping me with their softness and their grace.

Sometimes I become blind to them. Like a moving colour picture my eyes fatigue and no longer can percieve the detail. The blessings are there, no doubt. It is me with tunnel vision.

And then there will be a moment. A moment when J’s eyelids arc up and away. He is thinking, blinking wildly as he does so, furrow browed and I will be overcome. A cat arches as it stretches on the landing, and in it I see a perfect curve. There is a yellow bud, there is a pale blue sea.

I am loved.

To be loved is to be blessed.

She is a dancer and I can see in the way she holds herself, wrinkles falling to the floor, that she has the greatest elegance and poise.

It betrays her inner workings. She listens and I talk. She coaxes, I rail against her. She pins me to my chair. I wriggle and I grin. She tells me that my smile is but a mask, covering for my heart which is neat as her bun and wrapped just as tightly, with pins that pearce to its core.

Then she gets into her boat, travels back across the sea that this time of year is like glass. Tonight it was white, luminous. It looked like mist that was shrouding some great valley. The sea is no different to mist really.

I am blessed for her.

Yesterday was dusty. They sky was ruddy brown and the sun smouldered behind blue ash that filled the sky with debris.

There was a single cloud. Red. No. More orange than red, it followed me round yesterday, zig zagging over my shoulder blades, whispering into each ear without the slightest provocation. J said I should let it be, stand away from it and let it pass. I know he is right. Easier said than done.

This morning dawned grey. I looked out the window and in the light from the street lamp I saw the first hint of snow. Ice had formed round the rim of the lamp in shady particles. It took all of J’s coaxing to warm me out of bed.

My painting might be blue, but I am as orange as the flowers on the Poncia, that heat up our tropical nights.

I long for water.

Soon it will come.

For that I am blessed.

Last night as I settled to sleep there were baubles on the floor. They were white and perfectly round and my dreams were filled with opulescent globes that bounced from walls and corners.

The night before a thousand lights had twinkled in the black of the room. They made haste and broke on mirrors. I was swimming in a sea of silver stars in the Agean on a cold December night.

A cool wind.

The illness that has plagued me is in retreat.

The heat has begun to build. It will build like this, slowly, until at last the monsoon comes and drowns us with its deluge.

I am blessed today because there is water. Oh so simple to ask for water, but in this nation, what need! Even in this dry season, on this island that is the last outpost of a once colonial empire, there is water.

This is an arid nation. A nation of deserts, but here, despite the dry, I have given drink to my hibiscus, to the frangipani that bloom yellow with pink edges, to the tomatos that ripen red in the sun.

Today I am blessed for J. J has yet again brought waters to the deserts of my heart. In crevases where his love ekes, first as small currents, there is life. Green life, sprouting, unrecognisable in what was once a waste land.

Water and love.

Today there is restoration.