Bliss

I sat outside this morning after the morning walk, while the dog wandered around the yard sniffing all the new scents that appeared overnight.  Every day, I have this feeling of enormous bliss when I'm outside.   The surrounding world is what I can only describe as soul-expanding.  I have this feeling of exquisite happiness, it's better than anything else there is.  I don’t feel these feelings with anything else, with any other activity, though sometimes I experience something that approaches it, when I happen upon excellent writing and art, after rigorous exercise or spectacular sex, when I create something I'm happy with or I have a sudden intuition and brainstorm, and with the love I feel for Mike, Siris, and my son.   

Crepuscular rays

The bliss isn't in response to an especially glorious sunrise or sunset, although I appreciate those, too. It comes to me on ordinary mornings.  I'm thankful for these experiences.  They and the ones similar to them make life worth living. 

Raven on the outhouse at sunset

From Whitman's Song of Myself:

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
     distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
     and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread,
     crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the
     passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
     dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the
     eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs
     wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the
     fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
     from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
     the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the
     origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are
     millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
     look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
     spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things
     from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.