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Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness —  the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation.  Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights?  To their caregivers.

As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy.  I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness.  “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness?  What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”

Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!  That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.

Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.

I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being.  Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state:  All is right.  I am all right.

Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life.  From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.

Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and……..  Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.

Nope.

Never happened.

So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).

Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.

This is what I have come up with so far:  If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden,  then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.

When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill.  I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.

Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!

Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation.  May all of us today pursue our happiness!

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