Artists Week Journal

Be Here Now

I was awake at three this morning, finishing, eat, pray, love, the book Susan lent me (thank you, Susan) for this trip, and certainly a good book for Artists Week –for lots of reasons---but when I told Joan and James what I was reading, they both had violent reactions of distaste and disdain. I said, “She writes beautiful sentences.” I didn’t bother to defend the author as being both funny and wise, my favorite combination in people, including both of them.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite passages:

“I keep remembering one of my guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings’ (the italics are mine). “And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it…If you don’t, you will leak away your contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”