Recipe (for Happiness)

Begin with a wedding. Make sure it is the wedding of someone wonderful, like your spouse’s beloved niece Sara who has found true love at age 33. Locate the wedding along the McKenzie River in Oregon, just outside of Eugene, in a place where eagles soar above the wedding canopy just when the officiate welcomes the gathered community to hold and protect the marriage. Make sure the bride is beautiful, wearing a long white gown, flowers in her hair, that certain glow that tells everyone you have entered a venerable ritual moment. It is best if at some point in the evening the bride and groom are lifted up on chairs and pranced around by young and strong friends, while a samba band plays and fifty people dance in the grass. Hug the groom, whom you have just met, admire his dancing, his stamina, his pure and unadorned love for your niece. Sit back and sigh.

After a few hours, gather up this happiness like a bouquet thrown by the bride, and travel it with you back to the little house you’ve rented with your spouse and daughters. Lay on the bed with youngest daughter Emily, still in your wedding finery, chatting about everyone and everything. Make sure your older daughter Katie comes into the room and lays down with you, then add your spouse Jean, crawling in among the arms and legs. Chuckle together late into the evening. Let daughter Emily read a chapter to your from the clever book she is reading, laying on the pillow with a grin. Before sleep, look up to the moonlit sky, and sigh.

If at all possible, the next morning arrange to have a massage from the local talent along the river. That afternoon enjoy your family, remembering when, two years before, they came together for your own wedding. Revel in the matings that enrich life and require everything from life, stretching us and making the heart big, messy, thickly-braided, connected at the core.

After a while, follow the map towards Portland to the home of your sister-in-law Sue and her husband Tom, the mother and father of the bride. Everyone put up your feet outside in their leafy yard, enjoying the long northwest evening, fresh salsa, a bowl of chips, and wine from the wedding. Give their much-loved son Dave a big hug. Talk together about everyone and everything. At this point it is good to add in wedding photographs, freshly taken. Sigh and coo together. Eat up the wedding a second time like a sweet, decorated cake.

After a day of relaxation in the good Portland air, take a shower and put on something dressy. Drive across town and meet some fine poets at a terrific restaurant. Ensure that they are all beloved to you, people you’ve known many years. After breaking bread and laughing together, make your way to a lovely independent bookstore. If it can be called Annie Bloom’s Books, you have the exact right ingredients. Notice your book in the window, and the sign at the door saying that Sisters Singing will be reading there that night. Admire the empty chairs all set up for your event, and wonder who will come. Enjoy the lovely woman from the bookstore helping you set up. Be glad when she allows you to light a candle on the altar that holds the Grandmother Drum and one blessed copy of your book. Notice that two people show up a half hour early, and sit right in the front row. This is a good sign, a very good sign.

Thirty minutes later, the recipe will have reached its apex. Let your eyes sweep over the sixty people gathered standing room only in the store. Test the microphone, and tell everyone how beautiful they are. Then begin introducing poets, your very favorite thing.

Start with Johanna Courtleigh. Make sure she is tall, beautiful, a gifted healer and writer. Dance in your heart with the happiness she has found in Portland, at the lovely new home along a lake she showed you earlier that day, at the clear way her love pours from her as she reads. Then after the applause, add in more poets, who are, as it happens, all from Santa Cruz. Begin your spouse Jean. It is best if her sister Sue, a long-time ally of Sisters Singing, is in the audience. Listen to Jean read “Prayer for My Mother (At 83 Years Old)”, knowing that her mother is about to turn ninety in a couple of weeks. Be glad yet again for the joining that has shaped and re-shaped your life. Gaze up at your spouse and sigh.

Continue on. Introduce the wonderful Mary Camille Thomas, making sure her own sister, who lives in Portland, is in the audience. This ingredient always knows how to rise on its own. This heart is clear and quiet, as she reads her poetry that is prayer, that is blessing. Listen yet again to the applause. Next, stand before the assembled and bring up Cooper Gallegos. Listen to her resonant voice as she makes everyone laugh and sigh as she reads about attending a meditation retreat not knowing it will entail four days of silence. Journey with her into the heart of silence, finding the Buddha, finding the sacred in the tree, and in the plastic chair underneath the tree, and also in the silence at the core of her heart.

Then get down to the final ingredients. Bring up Marigold Fine, the irreplaceable, the lovely. If at all possible, ensure that her daughter who also lives in Portland, is sitting next to her before she comes up. Listen to Marigold read “Prayer of Thanksgiving” and give your own thanks to the divine Great Mother and to the Grandmother Spirits who have come to your life and blessed it. Admire Marigold’s beauty and fine good heart. Then stand before everyone and read your own poem “BirthSong." Feel it land deeply.

Then the last two ingredients. First bring back Johanna Courtleigh to read “The Coming of Grace"–letting her voice carry the luminous poem so that the room is carried into a hushed spell. Then welcome back Jean to read the last poem in the book, “We Must Insist.” This poem, she says, is a teaching from the ancestors about how to live in the future. Let the poem enter into your pores. Say yes yes yes. Feel the audience say yes yes yes.

Sit back, look up a the ceiling, close your eyes, and sigh.