What Makes Me & Us Happy?

I CAN’T BELIEVE I’m writing in clichés again! With such titles no Google or Bing search engines will ever find my blog, not to speak of this post! But this eternal human desire to be happy is so basic, that it is a cliché in itself. (Our lives are clichés, are they not?) Hence, no matter how unwise it may be, I cannot avoid clichés when writing about my happiness.

A few things have happened in my life recently that make me feel very happy! Excited! Elated! Even ecstatic!.. In short, simply happy.

First and foremost, I extended my on-line photography course for another year. You can read in one of my previous posts how happy photography and learning has made me. Secondly, I have started this blog and since mid February it has attracted thirty (!!!) unique visitors and two subscribers (my friends!) – I cannot thank YOU ALL enough for showing interest in what I have to say and show. You have to bear in mind that I started keeping this diary because I had to put my thoughts and photographs somewhere and I haven’t done anything special to attract readers, except for a few tips from the hosts of this blog, wix.com. I draw a conclusion that you have been attracted by the sheer force of my happiness, which is spilling over the brims and rushing in rivulets and streams to join with your happiness. This thought is very exciting!

I recorded in my paper diary how ecstatic I felt when I acquired the template of this blog and started creating my own version, wrote my first post, uploaded my first images. I felt overjoyed… It is even difficult to describe the state of my mind then.

And recently I’ve been approved by Shutterstock, and a few of my images from the Farm Gallery are already posted there. Perhaps for some of you it would be no big deal, but I felt elated! I nearly screamed with joy! I believe that one day I’ll be ready to offer my first prints for sale.

I shall explain why these little steps in my creative pursuits bring me so much joy. It is because I take them being a wholly mature adult, in the second half of my life, having extricated myself from the comfortable and all too familiar routine of an urban professional. It is because I succeeded in escaping the environment which I felt was restricting my creative instincts that I was beginning to recognise quite late in my life. It was because curiosity about life and the world got the better of me and I dared my brain to try things that I would have never thought of being able to do. And the discoveries that followed, about the world and about myself, have been more than rewarding – they made my life so exciting.

Ant, to top it all, after a long and hard winter, spring has finally arrived! I can already jump out of bed and go straight into my garden just in the pyjamas and, holding a mug of steaming coffee in my hand, make rounds inspecting the shoots of tulips and daffodils first thing in the morning. To be truthful, early mornings are still a little chilly and you have to throw a jacket on (I believe it was -1°C this morning).

And last night, for the first time this spring, I slept in my beautiful closed verandah, with two dogs by my side (already two!), with the double door wide open throughout the night (myself hiding under a duvet, of course), so that I would fall asleep with the cranes calling for me from the field nearby (there they call again!) and be woken by their call at sunrise; so that I could see them fly very low past my windows very early in the morning and return late in the evening; so that I could be woken up by the loud and cheerful wedding songs of the starlings which have already moved into all the fifteen nesting boxes across my old orchard and the new birch tree grove, planted almost ten years ago. And if those fifteen boxes were not enough, some of the starling families have made nests under the roof of the cottage. Again! But it’s so good to hear the din and the bang of these neighbours when working on the computer in the room (even while I’m writing these words).

It feels so good to be tuned up with the starlings and the cranes and the ado they make; with the first spring shoots breaking through the ground; with the spring breeze, the sun and the larks reigning in the bare fields around my cottage. Through the wide open door of the verandah you feel as if being a party to this spring commotion, you as if merge with the birds, their songs and their chores, with the breeze and the empty spacious fields. You become one of THEM. Is this also a cliché? No, I think it is not…