BBC recently started a once weekly podcast called the Happy Pod that gathers happy news from around the world. One of the features of this podcast is a spot where people send in sounds that make them happy… This has ranged from a tea kettle sounding off to the sploosh-lapping of a dog having a good long drink to the hum of an appliance to a kid talking to herself while she plays…

Each sound is unique and meaningful in its particularity to the individual but nonetheless something someone took the time to record and to share for the simple reason that the sound, whatever it is, inspires or reminds them of happiness. Each time I listen, I am struck by two things:

• 1) the utter simplicity of the sound producing event that most people choose
• 2) I almost always smile, even if it isn’t a sound I would choose

I knew immediately what sound I would share (see play button below photo at the head of this entry). It’s the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market not long after it opens on a Saturday morning. It is one of my great and simple joys to tuck into a table on the far side, by the water and a gigantic door of windows on a roller track–like a garage door might be. There, bag of bread, veg, fruit, etc. on a chair, I can settle in to a looseness that both grounds me and opens me… I am buoyed by the soft-edged constancy of sound that is vendors and marketers, is musicians, is people milling and musing, admiring the offerings and selecting what will nourish those at their table this coming week.

From yesterday’s journal entry:

At the Market, resting quietly within the music of the harpist who usually sits and plays at the corner of Dresden and Spring Garden. The soft edges of his playing and the way they go with the murmurs of patrons and vendors, combined with being tucked into a corner table on the water-side, right by a painter’s stall, …oh, it is so exceedingly pleasant…It is not dissimilar from the experience of listening to the choir at the round church last week…or at All Saints in the past… Moving, swirling, musical, parts coming together, creating sound-space, inviting others into the space, surrounding, absorbing, adapting to new shapes and sounds moving through the same time and space…an invitation to float within it for just a while and know that freeing peace of place and being…to float within it, to let it pass through you and become you and you become it, inseparable, for just a short while. Then opens the memory, then the body can remember…

Happiness is that way, isn’t it?