1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to attend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
pick up.
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs
or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful treehouse
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and then that way, be known

Please join Writing From The Inside Out by attending the read-around sessions on Friday afternoons. It’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional. If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read Around is September 2, 2022 at 4:00 PM (PST)

My Thoughts

It's in our constitutional blood in America: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The framers did not claim we had a right to happiness, only to pursue it. When we pin our happiness on things or worldly conditions or the accolades of others, it is an ever receding horizon. Instead, happiness often flies in under the radar, appearing as if out of nowhere, arriving all regal and abundant. It seems to be everywhere. Trap it and it goes flat, loses its luster, squirms out of our grasping hands.

Happiness “floats” according to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, So Much Happiness. It requires nothing of us and needs nothing from us. In its presence, we do not begrudge our chores. We even look fondly at dirty footprints others leave in our lives. We gladly clean the mess without pointing fingers or casting aspersions. Then, it actually is everywhere around us, not as something we claim or pursue, but something coming and going, woven into the everyday, like school kids laughing with the crossing guard, clothes stained from the playground. It is right there in front of us, floating in the air. But we may not even notice it while sitting impatient in our car glaring at the bright red octagon. But, when we are there, noticing, we can let it flow through us and be known.

So Much Happiness
Naomi Shihab Nye
https://poets.org/poem/so-much-happiness

Prompt Menu

  1. Write an ode to happiness

  2. Journal or write a poem about a time when you were overwhelmed with happiness. You can start with the stem sentence, With so much happiness…

  3. Journal or write a poem about the contrast between happiness and sadness. Or pick other potentially contrasting states: Fullfilment and Frustration, Pleasure and Pain, Admiration and Envy, Approach and Avoicance, Anger and Apathy, etc.

  4. Personify happiness and describe its qualites and traits; its habitat and histroy, its love and longing… or describe happiness as an animal or plant.

  5. Describe a time when something shifted in your relationship to your eveyday life such that chores and activites lost their burden and felt infused with new life.

  6. Journal or write a poem about a gesture, like shrugging your shoulders or raising your hands. When have you used the gesture? What inspired it? What does it mean? How could the gesture transform some unpleasant experience or unfinshed business?

  7. Describe a time when you were able to let happiness flow out of you. Or a time when you let the pen flow words or the brush flow colors, or your feet flow dance steps, etc.

  8. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you from the poem or from life.