Harvesting Happiness
By Julie Perkins Cantrell
 When considering ways to foster personal growth, it is important to remember simple pleasures. Joy enlightens the soul, so take time to grow this autumn by harvesting happiness.
Today, I harvested happiness in many ways. I watched a caterpillar crawling over rocks, dirt, and my daughter’s tiny fingers. I heard my toddler son say the word “promise” for the first time, and my preschool daughter described a newly winged butterfly as “elegant.”
I absorbed the sight of my children playing tag with our Golden Retriever, and I took a break to enjoy each stroke while I brushed her smooth coat. I soaked in sounds of children’s laughter, pigeon feathers in flight, and heckling blue jays.
I walked barefoot in newly planted blades of grass, feeling them peek through between my toes. I joined my children in “Ring around the Rosie,” painted our nails the colors of the rainbow, and found cloud-shaped pictures in the sky.
We gathered pinecones, laced willows through the picketed fence, and piled “big, big tall stacks” of rocks until they “reached the sunshine.”
We baked home-made chocolate chip cookies, savoring deliciously dangerous dabs of raw cookie dough in the process, and allowing ourselves to be powdered with flour. We tickled each other until it hurt…what amazing pain!
We entered a world of childhood innocence, where fairies leave presents on bedroom windowsills and angels visit sleeping children when darkness falls. We gathered around an old shoe box filled with hundreds of crayons and carefully chose “the perfect beautiful color for a prince’s stallion” and designed other marvelous images that bring happy thoughts to mind.
I ran my fingers through my daughter’s curls an extra time this morning as I aligned her parted pigtails, and I paid extra attention to my children’s little feet as I pulled their socks on to warm their toes.
Today, I harvested happiness. I filled my soul with pure joy. I grabbed hold of every little, simple blessing that the day offered me. With this harvest, I am thankful, and I am full.
May you also have a bountiful harvest of happiness this fall.
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