A knot of stress nags in my stomach and I adjust my backpack on my shoulder, containing every what feels like every book I own. I contemplate where I can sit for an hour and work between classes. I veer down a quiet pathway needing to get away from the hustle and bustle of campus life. I notice a bench beneath a flowering tree, maybe a dogwood, and decide to sit for a moment and rest my tired back. The air is still as I sit down, my mind racing with responsibilities and to do lists, but then a breeze suddenly blows through the tree above me and white petals begin to rain down on me, dancing and swirling, like a child performing to get my attention.

As I look up, silken petals gently caress my face like snowflakes that do not melt. And just as snow catches all the sound of the world and quiets it, this summer flurry dampens the noise around me, real or imagined, and it makes me smile. I feel it filling me up, the happiness of this simple moment, warm and sweet like tea and honey. I breathe it in and I feel it travel down my throat and warm my belly and then it keeps spreading further through my body, and keeps going, out of the tips of my fingers and toes. I am so happy I feel I must have too much of it to fit in my body.

I think back to a poem by Mary Oliver, Goldenrod.
“…I was minding my own business
when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
citron and butter-colored,

and was happy, and why not?
Are not the difficult labors of our lives
full of dark hours?
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light filled bodies?
All day
on their airy backbones
they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one’s gold away.”

Aren’t we all minding our own business all the time? It took a hundred white petals to pummel me in the face to distract me from my own thoughts. Isn’t it our consciousness that allows us this ability to live almost entirely absorbed in our own thoughts and our individual lives? We believe that we are better for it than the flowers and trees that stand idly by, living strikingly simpler and less productive lives, producing no evidence of success or happiness because of it. But these organisms also do not suffer the dark hours that Mary Oliver and I and everyone else do, brought on by our conscious minds. These dark times are generally deemed necessary in order to experience the light, but today I am given the gift of happiness from a tree that feels no pain or suffering in exchange. So where does happiness come from?
In the human world, we search and work and fight and barter and try to buy happiness from one another. When we finally get it we guard it from the world, hang on to it in memories and sentimentality, and even cause other’s misery in order to protect it. We fear that too much happiness will be noticed and taken away so we teach our children and each other when we are allowed to be happy and exactly how to express it. We build our culture on the premise that the most widely accepted definition of happiness is the only one and is more important than one’s own and then we let another’s definition dictate our lives.

We have even created a physical representation of happiness, money, and we value it over all else. And finally, we are so selfish in our happiness that we allow only, in our minds, our species to experience it, and allow all others to have only a limited capacity for it compared to our own.

But as I sit under this tree, and it weeps petals of joy, and the wind sends them swirling around me, and the warm hands of the sun rest on my cheeks, and the birds sing me a song, I do not feel like the authority on happiness. I feel like I am a small part of this greater, metaphysical system that controls happiness. And I believe more and more that happiness cannot be created or destroyed because it is energy and it follows its laws. It can be found in everything, and it can be given and it can be received. And no belief by humans can restrict it to just one species, or to just the “sentient” species, or even to only the living organisms.

I see so many people everyday that see happiness as retail and not as a gift, so many of them have come to value generosity as extraneous or exceptional. I hope that these people learn, as I am beginning to, to stop minding their own business and open their eyes to our place in the larger system, not above it, and they might see the way that joy moves through the world around us. And now as I sit beneath this tree I realize that it is not only giving me the gift of a joyous moment, but it may feel happiness too, in its own way, “in the pure peace of giving one’s gold away.”