Happiness is...

 Today I woke up and had a new and wonderful feeling.

I feel happy!

The views outside my windows tell me I have arrived! I live here, in Durango CO. I am whatever people call themselves who live here...the still unknown affiliate name.

For right now, this minute of cool air coming through windows, wrapped in the warm alpaca shawl (yes, what is loved is to be used!) and hearing crows and a bit of cars in the distance...I'm very content. If I were a cat...you know what I'd be doing.

More settling-in actions to do today. I started thinking about them when I woke at 5:30 feeling cold. I got a beach towel (what has been unpacked is probably the most useless things I own) and spread it over the summer blanket on the bed. 

The chant "Now I walk in beauty" came to me. So I didn't go back to sleep, and instead got some clothes on and just stared and stared out the windows. Made some "pour over" coffee. And I sit here just enjoying the heck out of being alive in this wonderful world. 

I loved the  five little houses on 2nd Ave, the roofs of which are below me. I think of whoever might live under those roofs, what they do in their lives.

 Then there are thousands (exaggeration probably) of buildings and trees between myself and the high ridges that tower above us. Not like other mountains I'm familiar with, the Appalachians. Oh no not at all. There was always the sense that the dragon backs of the Blue Ridge mountains were many pine trees creating the rugged ridgetops.

Now sometimes the ridges also have trees...ragged furs, bent by winter storms. And then long miles of no trees...where the stone has refused to give purchase to anything growing. I don't know that this is a feature called the "tree line" or just that these ridges are too steep to nourish anything growing.

And now it's 6:33 and the magic is happening. The rosy fingered dawn (thanks Odyssey, the best phrase I remember from reading it) has struck the Hogback Ridge that's above eyelevel. Now the flat appearing world takes on a third dimension. It just pops into life.