Small Happinesses ✨
For the good of the realm.
Let’s start with a little bit of context. I was walking home a week or so back after buying a cabbage and various bits from the vege stand next door, biting the end off a cucumber. It tasted excellent. It was sunny and no one was around to hear me chewing and I thought, this is brilliant. I think this might be the meaning of life, these moments of everyday small happiness.
When I got home, I began to draw, a recording of the moment. And since then, it’s become something of a daily dedication, an illustration and some words.
I thought, well I could share these. A post to social media. People seemed to like my happinesses, so I shared them a bit more.
And now, my friends, I am addicted. My Small Happinesses have become, for me, a healing balm of illustrated, wordy goodness that I look forward to each day, along with coffee (and I really love my coffee).
Art is magical like that, how it gives us exactly what we need.
As it happens, as my tumbleweed of Happinesses rumble on, I’ve created a Happiness List. It’s a place where you can receive the Small Happinesses in your inbox as and when they happen, should you choose to do so. You can learn more about that here.
But for the moment, it feels right and good and proper for my newsletter this week to be a Happiness Explosion. A collection of little missives from these past days so I can share the Happiness with you also.
In the midst of all the worldly happenings, I wish for you solace and delight. And perhaps, the fierce hope that you will find your own Happinesses along with mine.
KINGDOMS
At the moment, my two main steeds wot live within my paddocks are the solid, chunky type. Ada, who is young and not yet under saddle, is an Irish Draught, and if you don’t know anything about horses, they are a big ones.
Someone said to me once, ‘Gosh, when she’s all grown up she’ll be big enough to run a township over’ and I said ‘Yes!’ in such a thrilled, delighted tone that I had to add a cough and a disclaimer.
‘I mean, not that I’d ever do that’.
Although I consider myself a good person, I do love riding a horse I can capture kingdoms on. I’m also quite attracted to the idea of jousting, although riding around with a big stick does seem awkward, especially when you have to open gates, or your nose gets itchy, or you think you might like to stop to take a photo of something.
Anyway, I’ve gone a little off course because today’s happiness is actually about my dogs. Or, if we’re more specific, my dogs and horse as a glorious combination. You see, as I ride my patchy pony, Merc, around the farm, my dogs track right round with me.
There is Lupin, big as a wolf who lopes with a stride that appears to have no start nor end. A cyclic, fluid movement that’s easy on the eye.
And then there’s Frankie, who is not so stylish in her run but really terribly cute, and that counts for a whole lot.
Sometimes, they run behind me. Sometimes they’re at my side. And my absolute favourite is when the sun catches all of us and I see us a unit moving forward as four shadows, the subjects of our self-appointed Kingdom.
Where shall we ride today?, I ask them and we canter off together.
And the good people cheer and shriek and clap their hands for all to hear. FOR THE GOOD OF THE REALM! I hear them cry. FOR THE GOOD OF THE REALM!
My #9 Happinesses is my Kingdom.
BODIES
The other day, I was talking with my dear friend Tania about bodies, and faces, and in this instance, someone’s legs.
‘I mean, they were lovely legs’, I found myself saying, ‘but I know what it most likely takes to have a pair of pins like that and the simple truth is I can’t be bothered’.
As I said those words, I found myself delighted.
I’ve spent a good many years being really not very nice to this body of mine. And because she only wants what’s best for me, she’s done her best to help.
We’ve restricted or been weird about our food and overdone the exercise.
We’ve spent a lot of time trying to control our sometimes out-of-control-world (especially when we were little) by being quite unkind to this glorious, irregular, human shaped skin we move through the world in.
And I tell you, if there’s one thing that kind of behaviour quickly becomes is massively, profusely, spectacularly boring. And because ‘boring’ and ‘flaccid’ are two descriptors I’m morbidly afraid of being attached to my person, I must wholeheartedly commit myself to reject such monstrosities from my life.
I will say that I am very, very cross with The People Wot Have Planted Ridiculous Ideas About Bodies in our heads. This is one hundred trillion percent their fault, and I would very much like to have words.
But today’s post is not about them, because they are quite annoying.
This is a Happiness post, so instead we are going to focus on this:
I can see all of my imperfections, and I am truly growing to love them. I don’t mean this in a saccharine kind of way. I still have to throw out the voices in my head that try to convince me that this body of mine is something to be fixed. What I am grateful for is the felt knowledge she is not.
And I know that instead of reading or talking about jean size and measurements and skin firming creams, I want to talk about art and writing, and that excellent book you read, and how the tree in your garden is starting to change her leaves, and those birds that you see every morning who’ve become so familiar they feel like friends.
And when we see the cake and all the things that looks delicious, we look at each other and say, shall we?!
It’s not that we don’t take care and nourish ourselves and move in the ways we need to. It’s that we don’t fall into the trap of endless improvement of something that is glorious as she is.
Something I’ve learned:
When a body goes into a state of survival, her lungs drop down to wrap around her heart, an embrace of protection. Then, her rib cage moves in and around her organs like a shell, a movement towards, not away from, life.
How can you not love a body like that?
Well, we won’t even entertain it.
Today’s #7 Small Happiness is this body.
MEMORIES
I have a patchy horse called Merc who is a truly excellent person. Today’s Small Happiness could be about him alone- after all, what better happiness is there than to have horses grazing in your paddock- but instead we shall discuss how Merc scooped me up and carried me right through a magic portal.
Let me paint for you the picture:
The day was sunny and I decided that we would ride around the farm. There’s a field down the back that we refer to as The Flats. It’s not completely flat, but it’s flatter than all the fields around, which are hilly and quite bumpy, and because we are creative, that is how she got her name.
For the most part, the ground underfoot is greasy and we mainly walk around, but today, it was dry enough to frolic.
We trotted here, and cantered there, making loops and swirls of no particular design and I found I was transported. I used to ride on grass when I was little, a feisty girl who played a lot with horses.
At the shows I attended, a world that feels both distant and quite close in a way something old but familiar does, we would ponce and strut and I would be the Proudest Girl In The World as I rode my horse.
My body flooded with the feeling. My whole being rearranged herself to bring forward Little Me from a different place and time.
And I was reminded, of all the people that we carry round inside us. Different versions of ourselves stacked up like tiny dolls, released by a constellation of feelings or sounds or smells that fill the air like a strong and intoxicating perfume.
I rode and the Little Me with me. Enjoying the sun and our horse, and all the four legged beings we’d loved who’d carried us before.
My #6 Small Happinesses is to welcome and unexpected memories.
COMMUNITY
I’m of the personality type where it’s very easy for me to be a hermit. My closest friends live far away overseas, my work all happens from home, and I’m happy pottering and pootling and tittering to the birds outside my window.
Because I live out of town, to come into contact with another human for the most part has to be intentional.
I need to ‘make arrangements’, to take myself off somewhere, to place myself in the flow of human action that I’m unlikely to stumble across at home.
I was recently talking to someone about this:
What I miss are the kitchen table conversations, where nothing is arranged, but your community, those you love, will drop in and talk about nothing in particular.
I miss my couch friends, I say, where I can collapse on their sofa and not have to be anything but myself and anything around that is ok.
About a year ago, my husband brought home a little leaflet from town that listed a few art workshops. ‘I think you would be into these’, he said, and I nodded. He was right.
I have become something of an addict and a groupie in the best possible way, learning from some truly tremendous people all sorts of arts and making that are both sustaining and delightful.
I have found myself part of a community of interesting, intelligent, kind people. Kate, who owns the studio, is a natural Bringer Togetherer. She draws you in. Generosity and inclusiveness beam out of her.
The other night, we had dinner together and hashed out a few plans for some shared workshops. We sat around and ate some food, tinkered with ideas and consider what we could work on in the future.
In this crazy, modern world of ours, where we are all pulled into our individual streams, being in community takes effort.
It often takes a punt, a risk, a placing yourself somewhere you haven’t been before with the possibility of being very awkward. It might take a few goes but keep on going.
It’s peopley out there but the lovely Humans Beans are really worth it. I’ve discovered for myself that this is true.
My little art community are my #5 Small Happinesses.
BICYCLE
I was driving home from a workshop yesterday and there was a woman tootling along the cycle path. She had a big sun hat on, that was pinched in at the middle by a long ribbon holding it in place.
Her skirt was bright and colourful, of a size and nature that seemed immediately inconvenient on a bike, but didn’t appear to be inconvenient to her.
Of the things I loved the most, this was my favourite.
Everything that follows now is total fiction. That’s the beautiful thing about moving through the world- we’re never completely sure what effect we are having, who we might move by doing nothing but simply being ourselves.
I imagined her to be a lady that says inappropriate things quite loudly where the people around her are so shocked there’s a moment before they find their laugh.
I think she eats things. Things with chocolate and icing, loads of them, plenty of them.
I think she gets in the sea whenever she wants, however she wants.
And she paints. She definitely paints. Probably naked people that take up whole walls and when her relatives come over, they titter amongst themselves and gasp and play with the seams of their clothing and shuffle their shoes.
She’s a relief really, isn’t she? That to be yourself can be such a rebellion.
I shall care less today, in all the right ways, because of her.
Small Happinesses #2
Want to join my Happy List?
I have an email list of people who have signed up for the Happinesses each day (well, as many days as I am doing them which is most of them right now).
You can add yourself in here and my people will be on it (That's me. I'm the only people.).
xx Jane
This made me happy!!
I think you’re onto something. I love these happy little cartoons. You inspire me to try harder to drag myself from melancholy. We ALL need this in our inboxes right now. Signing up…