In response to "So Much Happiness" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Words to images
Images to memories
Memories to smiles
Sneaking across my face and twinkling in my eyes
Happiness sneaks up like a mischievous wood nymph
Dancing through the glacier lilies
and pirouetting on snowflakes
While sun beams put a spotlight on this miraculous performance
that warms us to grinning.
Can everyone feel such happiness?
Can everyone afford tickets to the wood nymph ballet?
Does sorrow scare the dancers and shroud the spotlight in shadows?
Happiness and sorrow are eternal and we would not know one without the other.
The spotlight is only visible because of the shadows.
To let happiness dance maybe we just have to welcome the shadows and move them into a good stage position.

"So Much Happiness" -Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.