Domweg

With everything that has been happening around us over the last six months, a poem by one of my favourite Dutch poets came to mind as I was sitting on the deck overlooking the valley, hoping to be able to saddle the horses to go for a ride when Niki comes home with Yarrow from a Church service (as part of their Faith Quest). It's a poem in which the poet J.C. Bloem sings the praises of city life, against the attractions of country life and nature which, even in his day (1887-1966) was under attack from urbanisation. But it's not the first half of the poem that concerns me, it's the second - in which he describes a moment of simple, pure happiness. The moment occured in Amsterdam, in a street called the Dapperstraat but, again, that is not what made me think of this poem. It's the thought of the occurrence of this fleeting, but intense moment of happiness which he describes that I admire in this poem.

Alles is veel voor wie niet veel verwacht.
Het leven houdt zijn wonderen verborgen
Tot het ze, opeens, toont in hun hogen staat.
Dit heb ik bij mijzelven overdacht,
Verregend, op een miezerigen morgen,
Domweg gelukkig, in de Dapperstraat. 

In a quick, and probably quite bad, translation it reads:

All is too much for those who do expect much.
Life keeps its miracles hidden
until, suddenly, it shows them in their purest form.
That is what I was thinking,
in the rain, on a drizzly morning,
Simply happy, in the Dapperstraat.

Simply happy. A wishful moment?

Now, if you think that all is doom and gloom here, no that's not the case, but the passage of time has been anything but smooth and unchallenging, and it is now that these small moments of unconcerned happiness light up like bright sparks and stand out.

I feel another one, while from the corner of my eye, I see the sun come through a gap in the clouds, and light up the intense green grass of the surrounding hills.