Following Bliss

A couple of posts ago, I used the phrase, "marital bliss."  I was being ironic.

I started being married on the night in the picture--June 9, 1967.  I was eighteen years old, the groom twenty-five.  I was old enough to think we were in love, but way too young to know what that meant.  We were drugged by the sweet love songs of the Sixties.

I don't recall many moments of  "marital bliss" after running through a rice shower to the Volkswagen and driving away, tin cans rattling on the road.

What is bliss anyway?  When my children were little, I was reading Joseph Campbell who coined the phrase, "Following your bliss."  Here's what he meant by that:

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

Doing the things that align with how we "ought to be living" then--that's the road to bliss. We don't set out each day looking outright for bliss; we stumble upon it when we're so engrossed in the doing of something we love that we lose track of time.

One of the ways I "followed my bliss" in those years was taking photographs of round fruits and breads and vegetables, then assembling those photographs into grids and framing them.

Sometimes I'd put dye in the circles in onion slices and watch what happened as the onion dried and the rings spread apart to reveal wider lines of color. I went to Mexican bakeries to get perfect round circles of sweet bread with colored icing.

One day when Will and a friend came home from school, I heard him call out to me from the kitchen, "Hey, Mom, are these bagels to eat or take pictures of?"

His friend must have looked perplexed.  I heard Will explain to him, "My mom is following her bliss."

What are you doing when you follow your bliss?  Tell me in an email--if you don't mind being quoted in an upcoming post as I keep exploring this topic.

I'll be following my bliss to Helotes this afternoon to the birthday party of two two-year-olds, Audrey and Elena.  Watching children play--and watching a huge Golden Lab playing with a tiny Rat Terrier puppy: these are definitely bliss-track possibilities for me!