It is the Wild in the Pink: Poetic Essay on Eudaimonia ( A Flourishing Life)

Flourishing photo by Renee Podunovich

It is late summer, and I am sitting with Sonja in her garden lush with wild pink roses, which on some years she harvests to make rosary beads using a 100-year-old recipe whereby the petals are dried, mixed with salt and alum, then hand-rolled and baked in the heat of the oven.
She is telling me about a local band 
made up of mostly men in their eighties,
how they still play together all these years, 
how there might be funds for a bandshell at the city park,
how it would add such enchantment to this tumbleweed town
precariously perched at the edge of Western civilization, 
how such a thing of beauty might offset the fact
that this place is in a perpetual state of continually-falling-apart 
before it spills forth into the desert and Indian country.

I am half-listening, enchanted by summer’s pleasure and a bit tipsy on chilled white wine, but when she says, “so and so, who plays the euphonium…” my brain halts, like that scratch across a record kind of stop and I store the word to look up later, and in the silence of darkness thick with stars
I end up on a 2 am tangential internet exploration 
that starts with the history of brass instruments
and ends with me listening to Brian Eno.
Euphonium is not Eudaimonia,
though it is also from an Ancient Greek word:
 εὔφωνος euphōnos, 
 meaning “well-sounding” or “sweet-voiced” 
which is a kind of “well-being” I suppose, though honestly, it is merely the off-rhyme that interests me, which is strange enough for a word-lover to make a point of it.

Eudaimonia is the wild in the pink roses, the light on the wine inside the glass before you taste it, then the lingering sweetness on your tastebuds.
It is the meta-awareness of the ever-possibility of being spun off into inconsequentiality or ether
but for the mystery of gravity, 
the feeling of warm dirt under bare toes,
the essentiality and rightness of intimate conversations 
with a beloved friend about beauty and hope.
A sure path to happiness is to forget — 
sit still enough that morning glory vines tangle ankles, 
be silent long enough that pollinators think you are wild roses,
open your soul wide enough to consider what might thrive
in a place so arid and isolated it is difficult for much to take hold,
but believe it can anyway.

In the best moments, I know I belong in this universe, in this life,
and can flow with ever-shifting meaning and constant change.
What was happening last year is gone, 
gone like all of the time spent spacing out,
not being present, missing the opportunities
to touch, stargaze, dance around the fire of well-being — 
that interstice between the contentment we hope for
and what we actually engage in every day,
that pull towards our potential existing somewhere 
between the desire to make prayers out of petals,
and the commitment and wherewithal to in reality make them.
Happiness is beyond λέγω — logos; it is the sway of your body
when the music begins, as the euphonium hums and bellows
from the stage of the new bandshell in the park,
and what was once just a plan, dreamed in the garden,
is now living notes that move us flourishingly.

Wildflower Feast photo by Renee Podunovich

Note: I am currently reading, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan. In a philosophical exploration of how modern humans make meaning, he uses the scaffolding of “Eudaimonics” — but shifts this philosophy from its roots in Eurocentric biases to include views from the East. In doing so, he helps to alleviate the cognitive dissonance experienced when we attempt to make sense of things within the old dyad of Science vs. Religion. This is a dated dyad, he claims, relevant at the time when Darwin was arguing with western religion, but not so useful to us currently. To resolve the problem of finding meaning in such a limited dialectic, he expands it to include six “spaces of meaning”. This broader sextet for considering “well-being” is made up of Art, Science, Technology, Ethics, Politics and Spirituality. He states, “Living is a psycho-poetic performance, a drama that is our own, but this is made possible by our individual intersection, and that of our fellow performers, with the relevant Space of Meaning.”
Published also at Literary Impulse at Medium