Notes from the Hatch: The Work of Happiness

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Piet Mondrian, Evening, Red Tree (c. 1909)

Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here with a recap of last Sunday’s meeting of the Hatch, where we talked about May Sarton’s poem “The Work of Happiness” and meditated on inwardness and inner strength.

In the last couple months, I’ve been consumed by the frenzied rigamarole of buying a house. I went through the whole process—putting in a bid, getting financing, signing countless documents at closing. Now it’s actually mine, and I’m still feeling a little frenzied—because there’s so much I don’t know how to do and there are so many decisions I need to make. Even choosing paint colors is kind of overwhelming. Who needs that many shades of white? 

Then the other day, I was texting with the artist and Isolation Journals community member

Rhonda Willers

about this. Rhonda is also choosing new paint colors for the interior of her house. She said she had approached choosing her original colors as if it were an art installation—something impermanent, subject to change. Immediately I felt relieved—I felt a little of that letting-go euphoria that Jonathan Biss mentioned in his essay “Toward Acceptance.” It was a necessary reminder: the stakes aren’t that high. Maybe the decisions I make will not be immediately perfect. Maybe the house is never perfect. But making a home is the work of years, and it’s so much better to think of this not as something to get done and get right, but as the beginning of a process—the start of a long story arc. 

And that’s something I see in today’s poem: