The Creative Every Day challenge for June is Bliss. (To learn more about this challenge click on the button on the sidebar.) Leah, who runs this blog, tells participants to completely ignore the theme, touch on the theme, adhere to the theme – lots of possibilities. I frequently ignore the theme, but it’s a good mental exercise to think about these things once in a while.
I started thinking about bliss. My first thought was it’s a scary word. BLISS implies something big, something huge. I think of Buddha, in the highest state of being, unruffled and untroubled, in a state of bliss. The highest degree of happiness. But in that happiness, you are so serene that you don’t need to define your state as bliss. And it’s a constant state. If you are always at that high, sustained level, the need to define the concept at all is irrelevant. You are.
I know bliss as a small word, a lower-case word. I don’t want to worry about achieving this elevated state of being; I just want to live with CSI – something I talked about in the post on courage. And no, it’s not the crime show – for me, CSI is continuous self-improvement. Maybe with enough of it, I’ll be in a state of BLISS, but now, my bliss is simpler, composed of moments.
Being in a state of bliss may be akin to a state of grace. I felt I was in a state of grace a few times, and I’m quite sure I can’t describe it. I just knew it. It’s a sustained high level. Maybe my bliss is just moments of happiness.
I pulled a few photos out of recent albums to illustrate what bliss is, at least for me. Part of my bliss is being able to take photos. Pictures tell the story.
Going outside today to take a look at the pond (I think I look for frogs as much as the cats do), I saw our first water lily. It was incredibly exciting – a very small but very blissful moment. You can dig deeper into it, however, extracting the pure bliss in seeing the wonders of nature – the complexity of flowers – shells – trees; the intrigue of the forest; the stillness of the desert. Sometimes, when I’m in the mountains or at the beach and see something of extraordinary beauty, it’s too much to contain and I well up inside, shedding perhaps a tear or two. Or more. My dad understands this – it happens to him also.
My daughter sent this the other day. Finally, in Colorado, it’s warm enough to bring out the wading pool. Just seeing my beautiful, innocent, happy granddaughter is blissful. The innocence hurts, but I know she’ll be ok when the day comes – that day that she discovers all is not well in the world. But for now, what more can you ask for? Family, children, the blossoming of hope and love – it’s just doggone blissful.
This grainy cell-phone photo is on the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The bar revolves. That’s me, two of my grandkids, and my dear friend Michael. That’s bliss – being able to have friends like Michael, share experiences (we’d all been at the Black Eyed Peas concert). Out of everyone I know, Michael is the closest to reaching the state of BLISS. He truly is one with the universe, and I’ve learned much from him. It’s also amazing and a little surreal that we can do things like stay at the Bonaventure, go to concerts, head out to Las Vegas for soccer tournaments, and order seven desserts for five people at a Japanese restaurant. Food IS bliss.
The big sky days we’ve had in abundance this year in Bakersfield leave me in a state of pure, unadulterated bliss. In fact, I’m thinking how to describe the feeling and I can’t – it approaches BlIsS.
This is a moment of bliss. It’s my youngest daughter and her children with Jose, her ex-husband. Lots of unpleasantness led up to their divorce, but it’s nothing less than blissful to me that they can come together as a family for Dax’s graduation, all smiles for the photo.
I gave a graduation party for Daxton. The surprise guest was her eighth-grade language arts teacher, who had to stop teaching for medical reasons and couldn’t finish the year. Pat and I have been friends forever. Look at Dax – if that isn’t bliss, we’ll have to redefine the word.
This is my oldest daughter and her husband. She earned her Master’s Degree last week. But the smile isn’t just for that. She and Matt are so in love that it’s almost painful. He’s so tender with her and she with him, as they attend endless soccer games and raise great kids, that they are in a state of bliss – whether they know it or not Which makes me feel overwhelmed with happiness. Bliss.
Here’s some of the grandkids and friends in the casita, their little hide-out at our new house. It astounds me that they all get along all the time and actually have fun together. I think this makes me happiest of all – having the family love and like each other, through hardship and happiness. It’s bliss.
More bliss – Jennifer’s graduation party. How amazing is it to have a house like we do, be able to have abundant food, abundant laughter, fun, friends and family. Bliss.
My parents at our house. Mom’s 87, Dad’s 92. Mom may repeat the same thing five times in a row, and laugh when she can’t remember the name of something (not realizing she can’t remember the name of almost anything), and Dad naps more than he’s awake. But they are alive, healthy more or less, happy, and in love. Married I think 68 years, they love each other more than ever. This, to me, qualifies as bliss.
It’s total bliss to see something unexpected that takes your breath away – like this moon. It’s blissful to not lose the sense of wonder.
That’s Jennifer, me and my friend Wendy. Wendy’s more than a friend, really – she and her husband and kids are family. We almost lost Wendy. A couple of years ago she developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and our world collapsed. Life without Wendy was inconceivable to all of us. She calls her experience with lymphoma and a stem-cell transplant her journey to the 8th continent. The bliss in this story overflows into gratitude, happiness, thankfulness – for Wendy, for medical care, for the sheer will to live.
This is bliss – four generations: three on the couch and the fourth behind the camera.
This, too is bliss. Not just the visit from my wonderful friend William, but just being able to have a friend like William. There’s 43 years difference in our ages. But because of Michael, who taught me to be open to what crosses my path, and Ray Bradbury, who told me he didn’t consider it odd at all to have a friend so much younger, and because of my family who understand and don’t draw borders and boundaries to fence people in or out, I can have a friend like William. All of the above are reasons for bliss.
Bliss. Blissful and happy that we can afford vacations, bliss induced by the ocean, sand and sky, and bliss that we’ve been married 42 years. We were laughing tonight, watching an ad for eHarmony. I said we should register and see if we came up as matches for each other. Mark said we probably wouldn’t, and he’s right. But – we share the same values, and they are what keep us together. Commitment, trust, respect, caring, and truthfulness. That’s what love becomes, after all. With both sets of parents as examples, I think we were destined to stay together as a couple, and it hasn’t been hard. Hasn’t always been easy -we’ve had bumps and it hasn’t been pure bliss, but the concept is – the concept of a committed marriage. With love.
I suppose my idea of bliss comes from family, friends, and nature. If I can have this many moments in just the last four months or so, I may be closer to BLISS than I thought. For now, I’ll take it in the lower case.
One last source of bliss – art. Tonight I did a couple of still lifes – set them up and photographed them. They came together quickly – by all appearances – but so much of the preparation is mental, running in the background, figuring it out, thinking, contemplating, that just the doing of the piece is almost incidental. In fact, I was reading an article in the tub (I always read in the bath tub) about a retrospective of the artist Yves Klein. Klein believed the idea behind the work was more important than the execution, according to TIME art critic Richard Lacayo. Klein said, “My paintings are the ashes of my art.”
I had done the collage in the background but wasn’t entirely satisfied. So today I put this rooster in front of it and photographed it. This I like. It’s called Rooster. For now, anyway.
I jumped up to make this still life because of a beautiful purple turnip. The turnip may not be evident in the finished product, but it was the catalyst. You’ll all be glad to know that all the produce in this photo is organic and local.
So that’s it -moments of bliss that are compounded by the abundance of it all. Little bites of bliss. And now, I am in a state of blissful fatigue, and I’m going to bed.
