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Two years and 27 days out – Be happy

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Hello, everyone, on this side of my “living on sweet potatoes and milk” winter. It has been a few months since my last confession, but (other than the ascending number in the title) there are very few things I am still counting. No, let me take that back. I am still counting my blessings and those blessings include all of you.

Life remains simple and quiet here in my deep hollow home. May was the wettest on record, with overcast and incontinent clouds overhead for 27 of its 31 days. It is true – too much of anything is never good. Unless, that is, the “anything” is the awareness of our bountiful blessings.

I continue to learn, continue to be thankful, continue to enjoy what being here now brings. Today (and yesterday and the day before that), now has brought bright sunshine days after mornings cool enough to see my breath, sitting on the deck with my quart of coffee, the two dogs keeping my toes warm and my hands busy with good morning back-rubs, my fingers flowing through their fur. Then a long soak in the claw-foot tub so that my hips limber up enough to allow me to stretch the first of several pair of work-socks I put on every day.

The times remain tough, but, surprisingly, the gifts that each day brings accelerate to match these times. Aside from the prayerful time in the Garden in the cool of the morning and early evening, I am venturing out to the woods and fields, collecting what is there to enrich what else is here. My blueberries look better than ever – tall bushes, iridescent green leaves, groaning with almost ultra-violet fruit. This year, instead of just bush-hogging my fields to keep them from returning to woodland, I am using my hay rake to wind-row the cuttings -- grass, clover, young wild blackberry canes and sassafras saplings – while everything is still fresh, still holding its richness within. Then I am coming along afterward with my pick-up and my pitchfork, filling the truck bed time after time and hauling the groaning greenness to mulch around the berries and between my Garden rows, smothering what is unwanted while feeding my desire – for food, for myself and for all of you (and then some more).

I am learning to rely on a single trip each week off the farm for supplies and for a recharge of my serenity in a pray-ful hour with my friends (and Bill’s). I am re-learning what I have, by taking the time to look for it. And when my solitude begins to draw me in, deeper and deeper, I hear from some of you. And I am drawn out, once again. Like Saturday night, in a loud and happy church hall, having dinner with healthy, selfless friends, people I care about, who care about me. Or a few weeks ago, when I made the (too expensive) trip to Knoxville to sit through some arrogant and self-absorbed graduation speeches and painfully repetitive photo shoots to be near enough to hug my nephew Daniel (the most giving of us all) as he received his law degree, his ticket to a lifetime of selfless service that will prove him to be (once again) the kindly exception to the lawyerly rule. Daniel (by God) Ellis, of the Tennessee Ellises, also (and forever) made of silk and steel.

A few other things draw me outward: time at the state legislature, fighting to keep the hard-won election integrity reforms that are now (so soon) slipping from our grasp. That desire to be truly all that we pretend to be as a country – of, by and for the people – is a persistent and powerful thing. Though, these days, it seems that the citizen-activist casualties are mounting, the survivors in the fight to save our democracy now countable on a single hand. But hey, it’s not just the Marines who can be proud, even when they (we) are few. If you’d like to read a bit about where this fight is, here’s a link to an op-ed piece I co-authored with the co-chair of the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, a piece that has now run in several newspapers across the state: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/may/17/tennesseevoterconfidenceactmustbenow/ . (And if you’d like to say your own piece to help save our democracy, let the governor here from you – now. . )

I am also busy working with several state legislators to re-establish Tennessee’s medical marijuana program. There is much exciting and potentially world-changing news on that front, though it is too soon to share any of that now. Suffice it to say that I have met both with the Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture and the leadership of the UT College of Agriculture in an effort to involve them in a pivotal way in our state’s program – a first for any state if it comes to pass. At the same time, I continue to comment on the failed medical marijuana effort underway in New Mexico, a program that once had so much promise and that now is suspended in bureaucratic lassitude. Here’s a link to an extended interview that was published last week on-line by the Santa Fe Reporter (if you get a chance to read this interview, please leave a comment there): http://www.sfreeper.com/2009/06/03/medicalmarijuanamartyrgrindsnewmexicosprogram/#more3577

So, as always, my life is made full by the energy of militancy and the serenity of the mundane. But it is also flavored by the wondrous gift of the miraculous. Several weeks ago, I crawled into bed early, burdened by the usual worries that most of us face these days in the aftermath of our economic melt-down and by the sadness of my growing separation from my once-tight family. Sometime in the dark quiet of middle night, a voice spoke to me -- a female voice gentle, sweet and clear – loud enough to wake me up. She said to me all that I really needed to hear at this moment, something that all of us need to hear, need to remember and need to live by.

Her words to me: “Be happy.” And ever since, I have been. Because I can be.

So now, as I finish my quart of coffee and my morning bowl of freshly picked black raspberries, it is time once again to be. Here now, and happy.

I hope to see many of y’all this Saturday for the third annual Gratitude Picnic. For the rest of y’all, I hope to hear from you soon, to learn how your own lives are unfolding and what is keeping you happy too, in these moments of mystery, mindfulness and miracles in middle night.

Until the next time, know that I am here with you, as you are here with me.

Bernie

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