Beautiful snow, nasty snow..

The Practice of Being  Happy. #13.  It snowed last night and today and everyone is so excited about it coming this Christmas and how the children will play in it, and how beautiful  our every day outdoors has become. As if my magic, snow transforms our world into a “winter wonderland.”

But snow is also a new opportunity for our problem mind to activate. There are delicious opportunities for new irritations. The neighbor didn’t park his car right. The snow plow dumped snow in my newly shoveled walk, someone broke my car scraper…you know how it goes. Life is an irritation, right in the middle of  wonder land.

Today let your practice be to notice this new source of irritations. There is the white virgin snow, and there is a lump of mud on it, your irritation. Follow the irritation, see the pattern in it, but don’t judge yourself wrong for being irritated. Don’t get irritated with  yourself. Just notice irritation. Say there it is, irritation. How interesting.

In this way you can practice letting pleasure and irritations both string your Christmas tree of the mind with blinking thoughts. Your practice of being happy will bear the fruit of lasting happiness when you can see your mind as a tree of blinking thoughts and feelings, good feelings, bad feeling….but just a string of conscious lights in the mind. You, however, are the tree, the evergreen tree of life…pleasures and pains are just the decorations.