Today a friend asked me about happiness. How can we help people be happy? I've been around a bit, eight decades or so, and here's where I've come to when I think about happiness. It seems to me happiness is composed of two things, meaning and agency. Finding meaning and discovering the agency you have within that meaning is, I think, one of the ways we find happiness.

Happiness is an inside job. Nobody can do it but the person seeking to find their meaning and discovering their agency. You can point it out to them, it doesn't matter until they own it themselves, discover it for themselves, on their own. The blocks to happiness are judgment and the desire to control. You give up both and happiness is really close. It's right there at the touch of your fingertips. Those two things can gum up the works faster than anything else that I've ever seen.

We don't make the world, but we make our experience of it and only we do that. It's where we reign supreme. It is the control we have. It is the only control we can exert over the experiences that we have. Our control is our response, reaction, and the story we tell about our experience. The story makes the world we create around the things that happen to us. All of that drops away when you're clear about what you're doing and when you know what your place and role is in making that happen.


Happiness reveals itself, I believe, when we discover something that's meaningful. When we release judgment of others and ourselves. When we discover the agency we have to make that meaning rich and fully alive in our lives. We realize that the only control we have is over what we do and how we think and how we understand all of the experiences that add up to our one wild and precious life.

Happiness is an inside job. It comes when you're honest with yourself. When you understand the responsibility involved in agency. When you open your heart to what touches it and makes it vibrate with joy. Happiness can't be given. It can't be created for others. It's a discovery each of us makes by ourselves for ourself. We can share our discovery with others, and we can delight in others discovery of theirs. But we can't do it to anybody or for anybody. We can only do it to and for ourselves.

So if happiness is an inside job and you can't really do anything about it for other people, what about relationship? Where does that come in? My stance on that, in my own life, has been to spend time where I can experience awe, where I can experience being amazed by what exists. The unending source for that, for me, has been nature.

I've kind of come around to the fact that involving ourselves with nature, on a personal and deep level is incredibly healing, is incredibly awe-inspiring. It opens up deep wells of meaning and shows us our agency all in one beautiful basket. I've come around to the feeling that our sense of ennui, our hopelessness, our feeling lost, our feelings of being overpowered, of being inadequit, can all be addressed when we start to take care of the earth. When we learn to reconnect, to see the majesty of our planet and all the incredible life within it. When we understand the depth of commitment to life that everything on this planet expresses.

To appreciate the delicate balance that life expresses to life and the joy and exuberance that it shares just by existing. Sense of humor in an octopus. Oh, my heavens. What an amazing, amazing thing to watch. I find meaning in helping to keep that life alive and in appreciating it. There's meaning in appreciating the gifts that are so astoundingly plentiful, so abundantly, exuberantly all around us. I have discovered an incredible amount of agency in being able to help life become more abundant.

To help life thrive I do what I can to meet the various needs that come across my path. It can be as simple as the need of bacteria for the food from compost or the need for another soul to express and find itself. They're all the same thing. The ability to see another and to understand how you can help it achieve whatever it wants to achieve is an incredible gift. It's a real thrill. Seeing the light bulbs come on in the heads of students in class is very similar. There's agency in that. There's meaning in that.

I's so diverse. It's so unique. There's curiosity and adventure, intrigue, gratification, and awe. What more do you need? What more do you need? We are so lost, so lonesome. We feel so inadequate. And there's so much that could be done right here under our fingertips. The grand plan is filled with trillions and billions of little actions that make it possible. When you find the little actions that you can do, that you like doing, that give you joy, poof, life becomes meaningful. Appreciation and gratitude go both ways. It's delicious to discover what you can contribute.

It's very humbling to discover that what you contribute is you. It's really nothing else. We're all so unique. We all have the ability to see and do something no one else can. We're all these minor miracles walking around. It's fun to see the miracles that other people are and to occasionally appreciate your own as well. It's satisfying without being stultifying, it's engaging. It's joyful even when it's sad. Even when it's not understood, even when it isn't going the way you would like to see, or other people might like to see. When people get in their own way and you watch new possibilities deteriorate, it's still interesting, it's still amazing. Life always gives you another chance to be able to express the uniqueness that you are in whatever ways you can. Whatever works in the moment.

There's something about dancing with the moment that is very, very special, and it's very special when you get to do that with others. Holding life lightly, but exuberantly, respectfully, with great admiration, and allowing it to do its thing, whatever that is. being curious about the outcome, appreciating the opportunity, and being awed by the possibility. Not being attached to the outcome is another way to release the need to control. That's the opportunity that I like to offer to other people. Working with nature, helping to cool the planet, certainly keeps my heart alive, and I have to think it might do that for others as well, but everyone finds their own path to happiness.

We all know the planet's heating. For decades our approach to this crisis has been to think about making others stop doing the things that make it warmer. Now that makes perfect sense. If you're hot, you can stop being hot by not doing the things that make you hot. However, that's only half the story. It's the other half of the story that I want to talk about.
 
You can stop getting hotter. Yay. But you can also work to become cooler. They're very different things. The stopping hot is really an action we humans can do, but only the planet has become a master in cooling over millennia. She has worked, James Lovelock was awed by this fact, to  keep the temperature on this planet in a rather narrow range for 65 million years. I mean, she has developed a certain amount of skill and savvy around that. All the plants, all the life forms have kind of figured out a rhythm that made it work, that rhythm kept things going within some ups and downs, but within a fairly narrow range of temperature, consistently over the eons. We stepped in and started heating things up. That's what's tipped the bucket over.
 
Until we get smart and stop heating things up, those of us who care and have the eyes to see and ears to hear can begin to work on the other end of the equation, cooling the earth. Now, we can't actually cool the earth. That's not something humans can do, not in the same way we can heat it. However, we can work with nature to help her do the job she already knows how to do. She knows how to keep the earth cool.
 
The Earth has a wonderful, beautiful, brilliant system of how that happens. Anasstasia Makarieva has been the stellar proponent of helping us understand how water moves around the planet in a way that manages temperature. It's called the biotic pump. It is a beautiful and brilliant mechanism. It is life chasing life.
 
Since we're so worried about heat, we need to pay attention so that we're creating the conditions that support life. That's the Prime Directive. We do that by helping water stay in the soil. It's simple and prosaic but so critical, at this point in time. If every one of us, in our own little way, started to ensure that whatever rain did fall, soaked into the ground and didn't run off into the sewer, or even to a nearby river, but stayed in the soil, stayed in the ground, our Earth would be a much cooler place. We can do that as individuals, get your neighbor to do it and we begin to scale, that's what we can do to help cool the planet.
 
There are lots of techniques for gardens, swales, dry creek beds, and wetlands. Think about your house, your house collects a lot of water when it rains. Where does it go? A 2,000 square foot roof will collect 22,000 gallons of water at a rather dry 17” of rain a year. Your job now is to think about where it should go and direct it to those places. Direct it to the trees around you, direct it to swales, to depressions, to places where it can sit and stay long enough to soak into the ground.
 
In order to make the ground receptive, it must be alive. Zach Bush MD said that there is, in a tablespoon of earth, more life than all the people on the planet. Now think about that. All that life needs water. All life on the planet needs water. All life on the planet needs water. All those billions and trillions of microbes and ants and paramecium and nematodes and moles and everything that's in the dirt needs water. Water is what their bodies are made of. That's where all that water goes. It goes to give life to all those things in the earth. When that happens... we have a cooler planet.
 
Where there's life, it's cooler than where there's not life. Dead earth, dry earth, stone, concrete, asphalt, all give heat back. When they absorb the heat from the sun, they reflect back eight times the heat they received. That's one of the sources the increased heat is coming from. When there's life in the soil, it's cool. The water can flow, the water can stay and the rain will fall gently and often only in cool green places.
 
It falls occasionally and hard, ferociously actually, in hot places or when it just can't stay in the air anymore. At a certain weight that water just must come down. When it’s in that state it's ferocious and horrible. Then we have flooding, we get more water than the hard, dry, ground can hold and there’s no place for it to go. That rush to the sea is wasted water.
 
Right now we're in that delicate balance, that state where this is fluctuating cycle is becoming normal. As things get hotter, it will be harder and harder to keep the soil green and alive. That means we need to actively practice soil health – at scale, now. We need to create places that the water can stay when it falls, long enough for it to soak into the ground. This approach has two prongs, creating space for the water to stay after it slows so it can sink. Things like dry creek beds and other forms of water containment along with directive processes so that when it falls, it discovers a good place to be. The second prong is that you also need to have live soil for it to fall on. If you collect water in cement or even barrels, it's not going to help the soil. Water needs to be held in vital living soil.
 
Plants with long roots, trees and perennials help open the soil to hold more air and water. They push the water down so it doesn’t evaporate but creates underground streams and refills the aquifer. So no pesticides. Stop killing things. We really, really, really need life. We don't need death. We need life. Stop killing things. Get rid of all the pesticides and chemicals that trick plants into forgetting how to help each other.
 
Begin to understand that everything is an ecosystem. That grass that you love is kind of like a desert. It doesn't give back much to the ecosystem. There are no bees that like grass. There's no flowers to feed pollinators on grass. Grass has very, very short roots, so it can't penetrate the soil and help the water go down. Plant perennials, even the things we call weeds, some of which are absolutely beautiful, they have the flowers that feed bees, insects and birds, and they have the colors we like. Make your lawn a meadow.
 
Become aware of how you are part of the ecosystem. You become part of the ecosystem if you're feeding things and making water available. Everything needs food. Everything needs water. Your job is to think about how to create an environment around yourself that is feeding other things. The pollinators, the bees, yeah, all those bugs we hate are a vital part of the whole ecosystem. We kind of know this. Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring made so clear the interconnection of all of poison and bird loss. We have forgotten that over time. We're losing birds, we're losing insects, because we are taking away their habitat. The heat simply increases that loss as it becomes too hot for some creatures to live.
 
We have a lot of work to do to begin to do our part in helping to cool the earth. Check out our website, LivingGroundCollaborative.org for techniques and resources to help you move back into relationship with the Earth.