Once again happiness pursues and dogs me. I say this because I have found that periods of happiness bring mental and artistic sterility in their wake. To be lost in happiness, implies a kind of senile self-satisfaction, does it not? Thoreau must of known something of this sense when he wrote that he wanted to live "with a wide margin", allowing things to grow and ripen inside him like stalks of corn. But I do not. I seek mental coolness and detachment in this harvest season if that is in fact what it is-- maybe it is but unbeknownst to us, we do not know the field, either the location of the silos or the place of the cooling brook.
To be happy I am afraid is the same thing as being a person who is "eating well", who has given full assent to the unfolding of life, its rewards and its coming around back to one. I believe that it is instead better to be a little bit hungry, a little bit lacking, better to not labor the canvas to "perfection".
Silent others at the four corners of the farmland, show me how to plant a bit more and labor a bit more while I reap, let me feel the night breeze that comes from and leads to other lands than this ground.
