Simple, Everyday Pleasures

I look around my house, and it is filled with simple, everyday pleasures.

The thought strikes me as I get up from the kitchen table to brew more tea. Everywhere my eye falls, there's something that brings me joy. Two small dishes on a wooden board on the stove - one has a few shrimp thawing and the other has a few pieces of frozen mango thawing. They're for today's installment of taco week. The half jar of freshly made strawberry jam I pick up from the fridge to put on a piece of toast. A small piece of a good gouda cheese that I'll have with the toast and jam and tea. The succulent garden given by a friend last month that is growing wild on my kitchen table. 

I pause thoughts around taming it.

Piles of paper everywhere, chaos that mirrors my inner world of thoughts, ideas, writing projects. The sprawl of work into my kitchen as the pandemic invited me to reshape my working practice. My kitchen became a library, writing room, video studio, office, classroom, meeting space, place of dreaming.

My kitchen's always been a place of dreaming.

On the window of my back door, there's a suction cup with a small piece of glass hanging there. It's what's left of my son's Eagle Scout project. He renovated a courtyard space in our church to create a reflection garden. One of the scout moms found two or three inexpensive wind chimes to put in the space, and the scoutmaster brought a plaster eagle in flight that they painted gold and hung in the space. When the church building was being renovated and the courtyard garden became part the re-design as a large, indoor solarium, someone wrapped up several items and returned them to me after the demolition - two wind chimes, and the gold-painted eagle. I gave the eagle to my son. He told me to keep the wind chimes. They were old and well-weathered. One of them had a swallowtail butterfly painted on the glass. I transformed it into something I could hang in the east to filter morning light just by cutting it away from the original and adding fishing line and a suction cup hook. I gave the other away.

As I look around, I notice many of the things that bring me joy are transformed pieces of what once had been beautiful and useful but eventually let go. Essence pieces of something once loved and somehow brought into a newer expression. What am I trying to say here? That I am surrounded with little pieces of beauty that take me back or drive me forward? That also express something about my present? There's something here. I know what it is in my bones,  but to put it into words? I have language in my preaching vernacular - little expressions of death and resurrection, death and rebirth, destruction and creation, new form emerging from the old. 

A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.