Everyone just wants to be . . .

happy. Right?

We think we know what makes us happy:
- a new car, an expensive new car, with a moon roof so we can always see the moon. (Well not always. Sometimes the moon isn't visible. We are already wasting our happy.)

- losing eight pounds. (Unless you are underweight and then you would want to gain, but the point is that somehow your body comes in sync with that perfect vision of your body. For many women that might be Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron, but for someone who always longed to raise her leg in a perfect arabesque, like me, my perfect body would be the body of Suzanne Farrell, with fabulous turnout, great feet, doe-like eyes, a long neck.)

- landing your dream job with a private office, a key to the executive suite, a private plane at your disposal, minions. (Except that for me my dream job would include horse stables converted into writing kiosks for writers visiting my writers' refuge and the doors would be unlocked and my dog would have run of the house and the grounds and I might go months without using or thinking of the word "executive.")

- winning the lottery. Yes, that one might enable me to achieve the Demeter's Den dream, but would it come with publicity and difficult decisions regarding who to help and how and resentments when I said, "No." So winning the lottery would not make me happy.

This morning, I was happy. Why was I happy? What happened? What amazing windfall did I experience that I stood in utter joy, in the moment, glad to be alive?

I "had to" walk the dog before I went to work. It was cold this morning, 28 degrees with a light snow and just enough wind to cut right through my skirt and leggings cold. I grab a plastic bag to pick up Sally's droppings. I wrap my scarf over my head like a hat, put on my coat and zip it so I can turtle my chin into it, and pull on gloves. I put the leash on Sally and she tugs me down the front steps. As soon as we reach the grass across the street, Sally halts; her nose twitching, her ears like signal receptors on full alert. She jerks towards the woods, her nose mapping the ground. Insistently, her paws clawing the earth and pulling as if I were a barge she had to bare.

"No. Stop Sally." I pull hard on the leash. "We go this way." I try to lead her up the hill, to our little bluff where she quite efficiently "gets busy" for me in the mornings so I am not late to the office. Sally is a good girl. She does stop. She does turn. She starts toward me and seems as if she will walk up that hill. But her nose hits the ground and she turns and leaps back toward the wood, toward the small hill that goes down and around behind the last townhouse, where the woods are deep and a muddy artery runs through the base of that gully. I stand still.

"Sally." She does not turn toward me but her right ear flicks in my direction in recognition. "Sally," I command with all the sternness I can muster. She turns her head, appeals to me with her eyes, gives a small whimper, and returns immediately to her watch. Sally has important business. Sally knows why she is here. Intent, focused, all her senses engaged, she is truly here. I don't think I should resist that. So I follow her lead. My shoes slip a bit on the muddy silk and we go toward the gully, round the bend, reach a crest. The air is sharp with snow; my lungs braced with cold, my heart happy.

Sally stills. Her posture very solid, her tail raised. I follow her line of sight; between the brown tree trunks, the fall leaves, a rack of a buck, then the majestic chest and shoulders, frozen cadence of a stilled buck comes together, like the fragmented moments of our lives that end up telling the real story come together. Once you can get paste the bracken, your sight is clear and you wonder how you hadn't seen it earlier. I can see the buck. I see the buck see me. We are looking at one another. We stand and breathe and look and I am full of the recognition of something I don't need to understand. Three seconds at best, but the reach is much longer. Sally's softest whimper sends the buck fleeing for shelter, the heavier blanket of deeper woods.

"Good girl, Sally." I rub the hair soft as pudding behind her ear. "Good girl. Thank you, Sally." And for moment, I feel like Suzanne Farrell knowing I'd turned out of my routine, had sure footing, and at least, for a moment, a buck had looked into my eyes. I was happy.

I am happy. This is that nature of happy. Creating, writing, looking at the world, engaging, slurping it up; this is my definition of being happy.