Lo! Like a Chesire Cat...

Is it possible to not worry for one year, that is the question. And I have an answer. I heard of a man who said once, I won't get angry. Anger served no purpose in his personal life, and I suppose that from the perspective of his advanced years, he had the crisper vision to, if not never be angry, tame his anger - or have the resolution not to steep in it.
Bury the burial ground, don't let it bury you. That was a line in Liu Sola's "In Search of the King of Singers" - and she reaches that realisation through personal pain and being faced with a colourful daubs of oil paint on canvas in a distant village house at three in the morning.
Maybe the lesson comes at the most inopportune time, the time when safe people are tucked in their beds, sleeping to the music of the rain. I imagine that my worries are carried away by that rain, into the complexity of the ecosystem, reaching the enormity of the sea, which outsurfaces land mass anyway, and returning to the skies, cleaned of its salt and impurity.
Worry: v. intr. 1. A way to cope with contexts where the rules are always changing; 2. A reflective activity a person undertakes to discover their inaccuracies before other people can see them. ...That blog posts remain does not mean that I think they were accurate later. Hardy har.
Here is an image I consider diametrically opposed to worrying: rain beading off of a swan's back, leaving not a trace of wetness. Oh, swans, noble creatures.
In the West, many of us are taught to locate the root of our discomfort in earlier occurrences, to shine a light through ourselves in the tunnel of time, to reach back and rescue our child selves from the corruptions of life. Not knowing that wherever we look, we can make stories. Many are the rabbit holes, and not all Alices return. But speaking of Alice in Wonderland, I prefer to think of the Cheshire cat's smile. Because this week I noticed that if I smile, malice does not reach my eyes.
Once upon a time, I worked at an antique store, where I spent all of my earnings on a beautiful Chinese watercolour of Buddha. I loved the mastery of the strokes, except for the orange nose, which looked like a jagged carrot. I asked my coworker about it who said, but don't you know - as he scrunched up his nose and smiled - that is what people do when they laugh! The inscription on the side read, only Buddha can smile at everybody, only Buddha can laugh at everything (which I was told to mean, if cryptically, even at the political).
Indeed, the moment I found myself smiling, I realised I had been graced with character-building experience, the kind, once one has experienced, one will seek to replicate. What a waste to have spent so much time worrying about those things I could not change. How much more sporting to greet life with a smile.

Letter Print.