Happiness: easily the most sought-after feeling in the entire human existence.

But why is happiness the prima ballerina of feelings? Why do we base every decision and choice in our lives just to seek that which appears so elusive?

I want to be happy, we say. Yet nothing we do ever seems to keep us lingering in that realm of happiness where only an elite few seem to reside.

What is happiness? How do we measure a feeling that is so subjective and so complicated?

Happiness is our body on theirs, like a photograph hung up and entitled “happiness,” like calling it so, will make it so. Happiness is the language of our eyes that speaks to the trees and forests and reveals secrets only the wild, wild rivers can keep. Happiness is wild flowers sprouting from our chest and kept alive by the waters in our veins and the sunlight in our heart.

Happiness is a dream. And we can’t live in a dream.

What of the untamed heart that wants more than a dream? What of the body that floats on tides made of anguish and madness? What of the tainted mind that lives in a celestial orgy of gods and monsters, fighting to partner that prima ballerina on the dark side of the moon?

If we find ourselves dancing with shadows, we should have no fear for even the darkness has lessons to teach. A thousand leagues under the dark, dark seas, live creatures we could only dream of. Even the sun sets willingly into the darkness.

We must stop defining our lives based on our proximity to happiness.

The human experience is comprised of a multitude of feelings that are equally as powerful and equally worth having.  We will never be completely satisfied until we realize that even if we are not happy, we are something else just as important.

I, too, want to be happy, but that is not the only thing that I want to be.

I want to be crazed and unquiet, aghast and melancholic. I want to experience it all for they are all prima ballerinas in the same ballet, for there is no ecstasy without the agony.

I want to be the gardener of my soul.

I want to keep the blossoms and the weeds. I want to be a rogue planet that roams around the galaxy, picking up feelings like flowers, smelling them all, red roses and black dahlias alike; for they all smell like heaven, my dear, and together they create a garden to wander through.

“Honor your humanness and all of your feelings—the messy ones, the aches and the pains—because we can’t have the dark without the light.”

~ Sabrina Ward Harrison

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Editorial Assistant: Yaisa Nio / Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Flickr / Randy Robertson