Summertime happiness…

When you live in the Pacific Northwest, you get used to thinking of “summer” based on the calendar alone, as you certainly can’t count on the weather to inform you. But despite overcast skies, colder temperatures, and drizzle, we have some spectacular days/weeks that give you a glimpse of what’s to come each July-August.

These glimpses also offer occasions where I reflect on true happiness, and it reminds me that each day I can choose happiness whether it’s dreary outside or not.

Taking a break from our normal highlights/lowlights update, many of you know that recently I’ve been reflecting on happiness instead.

Happiness is:

• A sharp scythe
• Colorful foxglove rising among blueberries
• Healthy bees
• A bicycle ride through blossoming cherry trees with your daughter in tow (and not needing rain protection gear!)
• Early morning sessions at dawn of moving meditation in the pasture, clearing paths
• Wildflowers spreading along pathways in a food forest
• Watching your son take 45 minutes to simply collect eggs as he’s carrying on extended conversations with the chickens…in their language
• A greenhouse full of chili pepper plants
• Calendula flower petals finding their way into your salad…medicine that tastes good!
• Finding carefully piled collections of natural materials curated by a six year old, ready to make another fairy house
• Hugelkultur beds actively producing crops with minimal watering
• The blessing of viewing Mount Rainier from above the clouds
• Finding semi-wild elderberry trees with bright red berries…medicine growing on trees!

Poppies on hillside

Curated materials for a fairy house

Wild elderberries

Completed fairy house among the tomatoes

Foxglove among the blueberries

Mount Rainier from about the (almost) constant cloud cover

Healthy chili peppers waiting to go outside