On Orange Sherbet, Happiness, and All Things Sacred//Day 11

Happiness.

That's the second page that wants to come to my altered book All Things Sacred.

Even though I made a list of All Things Sacred and happiness wasn't on it, happiness made it to the page.

The first page was Gratitude.  Of course Gratitude is sacred.  Think what our world would be without it.

But now happiness.  I want bright colors.  I mix hot pink, yellow, and orange.  Those colors represent happiness to me.  When I put them on the page, they blend into a kind of a sickish orange--more like orange sherbet, I guess, than the happiness look I am aiming for.

If I was more patient, I should have waited for one color to dry before I put the other one on.  But I wasn't more patient.  I did add some purple ink for flavor.

So I am working with orange sherbet.  In my happiness pictures, a huge sun always appears.  I add in some fluffy white clouds, flowers and a little girl.  Little girls remind me of the happy me when I was an imaginative, precocious child.  They remind me of dancing around hydrangea bushes, playing on an old quilt under the maple, doing a little hopscotch, or roller skating down the street.

I write the words Happiness across the page.  I sketch in my happiness symbols.  Next, I grab my paint and color in the picture.  This truly makes me happy, engaging with the paints on the orange sherbet page.  By this time, I have gotten used to the orange sherbet.  I'm at peace with it.

I dress my little girl in a purple frock.  I paint my flowers deep, deep pink with cool blue centers.  The stems are that lighter shade of green I love.  Bubbles on the page form from the purple of the ink then some white and blue.  White dots appear across the top.  A bluebird chirps at the bottom of the page.

The coloring is done.  But the page still wants more.  I add white squiggles.  I outline what is on the page in white.  Everything seems happy.

This was a pretty easy page to do once I got over the orange sherbet background color.  Once I accepted it, observed it, and became happy with it, all was creatively well.

But this process taught me a little about happiness.  How we try to MAKE it be a certain thing, appear in a certain way.  We demand our background be the color we want, not the orange sherbet that shows up.  We try to change or get rid of or ostracize people or jobs or things that come along in our lives that don't make us happy.

If we accept what comes and live into it--happiness can be the result.  I know.

I discovered that happiness can come as orange sherbet.

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Where do you find happiness in unexpected places?