Dark Cloud Country: Relationship One, Chaos

"It is when death starts to move, that maggot-filled and mucky motion that silence makes animate."

This is the first section or “Relationship” of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

Relationship One: Chaos

All my life I have experienced happiness, except that which was not happiness itself but felt like happiness was there, just indifferent. She never really leaves, you know. Happiness, that is. We come into this world with nothing and leave with nothing, but what happens in between our comings and goings can only be happiness. It is not a thing that happens to us but a thing that happens when we become alive—or accept the life we are given. It is an essence inevitable and implicit to life. Or maybe it is the place in which we are, in this moment and every moment after this one, alive.

Happiness’ etymological root extends deep into the early life of our language and is constructed from the ancient word kob, from the Sanskrit meaning “congratulations,” and is complete in both form and function in Old Slavonic (the language of Mokoš and Neva Nevičica) in the noun, kobu, meaning “fate.” Isn’t that what it means to be alive? To be a blessing to fate? Happiness is not bliss or well-being or contentment or joy, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary would have us believe. No, happiness happens when life is living and happiness emerges when we labor through the common periods of our lives, not seeking happiness as if it could be found, but by being fate’s blessing and then by being blessed by fate herself.