Shutter Sisters

coconut

By

Coconut by Paul Hostovsky.

“Bear with me I want to tell you something about happiness it’s hard to get at but the thing is I wasn’t looking I was looking somewhere else when my son found it in the fruit section and came running holding it out in his small hands asking me what it was and could we keep it it only cost 99 cents hairy and brown hard as a rock and something swishing around inside and what on earth and where on earth and this was happiness this little ball of interest beating inside his chest this interestedness beaming out from his face pleading happiness and because I wasn’t happy I said to put it back because I didn’t want it because we didn’t need it and because he was happy he started to cry right there in aisle five so when we got it home we put it in the middle of the kitchen table and sat on either side of it and began to consider how to get inside of it.”

Happiness and its pursuit can be so abstract and somewhat of an illusion, so I really like the idea of trying to characterize how it manifests itself in our everyday life.

For me for instance, happiness was in how this poem inspired me and made me run out of the house this afternoon in search of coconuts, with my heart full of wonder. It was in finally finding a whole box of them hiding under the shelves of a little Mexican market. It was in catching myself sitting on the floor of the store taking pictures while other shoppers wondered what the heck I was doing. It was in coming home with two coconuts without knowing how I was going to get into them. It was in asking my husband for help, watching him google it, then seeing him come back with a screw driver and a hammer. It was in taking the time to do a silly spontaneous project like this, and it was in how the two of us found ourselves in our kitchen, at the end of an ordinary day, along with the coconuts, finally open.

Can you share with us any images of how you’ve captured tangible happiness around you?

Comments

  1. I love this posting! It’s so true. Happiness is very abstract and what one views as happiness is so different from someone else’s, but a little child’s idea of happiness is always the same; and there’s such beauty in learning from children and being reminded of what happiness truly is – a moment…a look….a taste….a smile.

    Thank you for sharing your story and photo!

  7. Happiness…..it’s found in so many little places.

    This is my happiness. It’s a photo of my niece that had a brain tumor. She’s tough. She’s a fighter. She has 5 children. This day, happiness was found in her hair. Hair that grew back after surgery. Hair that used to be perfectly straight but came back curly. Just hair. Happiness was found here. 🙂

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/22545991@N07/4372370303/