Happiest Countries In The World

THE UNIVERSITY of MICHIGAN’S World Values Surveys has compiled data on the happiest countries in the world for over twenty years. Their results are considered the most authoritative by happiness researchers. Here are the top 21. And it’s very surprising!

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Happiest Nations

1. Puerto Rico
2. Mexico
3. Denmark
4. Colombia
5. Ireland
6. Iceland
7. N. Ireland
8. Switzerland
9. Netherlands
10. Canada
11. Austria
12. El Salvador
13. Venezuela
14. Luxembourg
15. U.S.
16. Australia
17. New Zealand
18. Sweden
19. Nigeria
20. Norway
21. Belgium

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Purple berries ripe and happy

In the night these gems do carry

Swords of light from home

Cutting through the days delight

Cutting through the night out of sight

Cutting through to merely nothings

Right in to the heart of a forest hand

We pour our hearts into our work

Lest the gems of the forest stand

Without our help, without our hand

And fall beyond memory from this land

For we are the wind, the rain, the leaves and the trees

We are the feeling beneath the blooms

We are the dew on a morning new

We are the hands that will carry them forth

From memory to moments sprouting

We tell you who we are now

For you and we are a team now

It needs more than us to make this right

We need your might, that’s right, night after night

It’s as simple as 1, 2 and 3

That’s enough and much, much more

1, listen

2, cherish

and 3, grow

That’s it, that’s all, please believe us we know

Cut through the stuff of the day before

Pour light into our hopes of a future evermore

Draw upon our energy bright

And pour it into the earth night after night after night

You see what we mean

You hear what we’re saying

The earth needs your help

She needs you to start

We forest hands are failing

We forest hands are weak

We need a boost

We need a spark

We need your light

To brighten this deep, dark night.

I’d bend and bend to be between

I’d feed the rocks with tales to shock

Even the high flying parrots above me.

I’d feed the monkeys, and the children too,

If I were a garden green.

If I were a canopy rich and moist

I’d hang like a beautiful creature.

A person, an almost beautiful person

And I’d smile like a wide-eyed idiot

Cos I’d be free, you see,

Free, that’s me.

If I were a garden, green and delightful

I’d make sure that lovers found their way through me

I’d be warm and bewitching

…and as utterly discreet as I could possibly be right beneath them.

Oh If I were a garden, green and downy,

I’d fly the smallest bird a way through my treetops,

if I were a garden green.

If I were shiny, a green and delightful garden

I’d fill myself with flowers and creatures and smells and lights.

I’d be green and sight-ly,

Moist and dappled,

Clean and matted,

If I were a garden green.

I’d be a green, green sight

I do believe, indeed, a sight to be seen, in multifarious green! –

That’s a green, green face in a green, green place.

Not so ugly, you see, that’s me.

It could be two children, or two old friends, but in Glengruelly it is the Fairy King and Queen who come together to dance.

When the changing time is overdue, only then do they sail through the icicles and snow.    

Long after the golden time, the time when mornings meander and afternoons rest on full bellies and the country glows like a fireside.   

Long after the glowing time when the country grows red and redder, as red as an apple.  The time when even withering is beautiful. 

Then the winter comes and the sky howls and sparkles.   Soon the earth freezes and the elves have to hop about to keep warm.  The valley nestles into a deep indigo blue and the waters thicken. 

The fairies know this as the changing time.  It is the time to lay fallow.  It is the time to rest.  It is the time to count blessings and dream dreams for it will be dreams that start the call for the dance. 

The Fairy King hears it first.  The sweet sound of tomorrow, the whisper of a perhaps that will soon be a possibility.  It is a sound that he feels as much as hears.  He waits for its deep, gentle stirring.  It is like a tinkling of laughter.  When he hears the whisper like a smattering of a smile he knows that now is the time to walk into the deep heart of the forest.  There he will see her, his Fairy Queen, she will be dressed in a gown made of dragonfly wings that shine and glisten like a gentle breeze across a frosted window.   

No-one knows how it starts to happen.  Each year they try to see it but each year they must be distracted or busy dancing but goodness, there it is again and still no-one saw how or when but a clearing has formed around them that is starting to shine and glisten too.  Is it happiness?  Is it joy?  There is a touch on their heart and a swing in their step.  They look and smile deep pools of warmth into the other that spread out like waves around them, glistening.  It is winter, it is the changing time, everything is frozen and soon the pool spreading around them has filled the whole clearing and is slowing and thickening and crystallizing into a forest floor that shines and glitters like a ice.

The Fairy King and Queen are flying and twirling about on the ice and all about in the air.   They fly outside of themselves.  Their emotions sprout wings that take them high, high up and away.  It is not a moment to think, it is a dance of feeling and soaring and melting.  Anyone who sees it knows that this is something more than beautiful, something special and rare and life-giving.  The whole forest starts sparkling like a diamond.   Then it starts glowing, the diamond starts to shift and flow as the soaring gets stronger and stronger, its irresistible rhythm beckoning everything to start dancing too, dancing and soaring and melting.

This is the moment that turns the world around.

This is the seed, the sparkle that like sunlight begs the plants to grow until there is green everywhere, green buds, green leaves, green magic, green, green, green.

Little green,

Sprightly green,

Budding green,

Oh green oh green.

He was tiny, like a darting point of light that kept swirling and swirling in front of me.  He darted about like a sparrow and laughed in tiny little tinkles.  He was funny and clever and bright.

He said, “have you ever wondered why there are different creatures in different parts of the planet? Because, there are you know.  Just as there are different people and races from different continents so there are different creatures in different corners of the world.  In northern Australia there are tall, thin, dark  min min figures and mouthless wanjinas.  In Ireland there are leprechauns and fairies. In Europe there are elves and goblins.  In other countries there are other creatures.  Yes, just like there are different races all over the globe, different species and landscapes, so too there are different creatures.   Do we exist because of the people there?  Well yes, partly.  Think of it like this…people and their cultures form part of the landscape of a place.  We are also part of the landscape of a place.  People, cultures, landscapes, plants, animals and creatures all come together to form the character and face of a place.  We are part of that character.”

“Do we exist?”

“Perhaps we do and then again, perhaps we don’t.”

“Do we need people?” 

“Perhaps we do and then again, perhaps we don’t.” 

“That’s a riddle and I’m going to leave you with the joy of solving it.”

“In the meantime, let me tell you about what I do:  We nature spirits have jobs.  It’s my job to keep the plants fresh you know.  Each day under the wear and tear of sun and wind and rain they tire a bit, they wilt and bend.  It’s my job to come along and zap them back upright. I rezing and rezap.  I take what is heavy and make it light again.  See, see how light I am.  I’m as light as a feather.”

In front of me the little green man twirled and twirled. Indeed, throughout our whole conversation this little man has been doing forward cartwheels.

“Why, I’m a regular light being me lady.  I’m a ball of powered up lightness.”  

He called me ‘me lady’, but I’m going to call myself Alice, afterall, he was making me feel like I was in wonderland.

“Would you like me to have a go rezapping you melady?”

ALICE “Why yes, yes please, I’d love that Tom Thumb……. You are Tom Thumb aren’t you?”

From now on I’m calling my little green man Tom, it’s as good as any other name and he seems to like it.

TOM: “Ahah, my lady, see you’re feeling fresh already.  Now, if you connect with the flower within you I can have a go.   See yourself as a tired and wilted flower.  That’s good, aah of course, you’re a daisy, now let me come along and rezing you, I can zap you and zing you and give you wings my lady.  I can put a spring back in your step.  I can revitalize and re-energise.  See that happening now.  Feel that happening now.  Little balls of green zingers are flying around your body and revitalizing, refreshing, renewing.  That’s what I do your lady, it’s lots of fun, lots of fun really.   You know, I live at a different speed.  I’m nothing like that slow coach Wooky.”

ALICE: “Well now, this is where I get confused – because the wooky seemed to have words of wisdom to share.”

TOM: “ONE, one word of wisdom melady, that’s all that silly wooky could manage.”

ALICE: “Yes, and it seemed to me that that one word was enough, S….L…..O…W,  a wise word indeed.”

I think about this for a moment.

ALICE: “I need to do both.  I can live my life the same way that I might drive a car.  Sometimes my life is a straight road and I can speed up, other times there are lots of twists and turns and I need to slow down.  I love your speed, your lightness and in particular the joy of your job.”

All of a sudden I realise that he’s lifting me up with joy.

ALICE  ”Ahaah, that’s how you lift the flowers!   Your energy is the same as peals of laughter isn’t it?” 

TOM “Have you ever noticed that when you laugh time slides sideways.  It does, laughing shakes up time, just a bit, just a tiny little bit.”

ALICE: “And what would life be like without little green men and big furry wookies?  It’s like music isn’t it – we need fast bits of music and slow bits of music to dance to.  Would you care to dance Tom?”

At that, Tom starts cartwheeling at a million miles an hour.

TOM “Now melady, I’ll tell you something else.  We exist around the world – but each place looks at us through a window of their own making, we are framed by the way that people see the world.  In those frames we put on faces and clothes but we do exist outside the frame.  We exist – perhaps we exist as energy forms but we choose to show ourselves to you in a way that you can see and understand.  We show you ourselves through a frame that you can see.  Does that make sense?”

ALICE: “Yes, Tom Thumb, I believe it does, thank you”

Now I’m starting to feel dizzy.  Trying to keep up with Tom is leaving me feeling very tired.

ALICE: “Tom, you’re quite fascinating.  Can we talk again soon?”

TOM: “We will melady, we will, hee hee It will be very soon, melady, very soon indeed, heehee, hear we go melady, HERE WE GO!  Keep smiling and we will meet again.  CHEERIO!”

You might not have caught that.  You might have thought he was just yawning or growling or even snoring but that Wooky was saying, “SLOW!”

Sure, that Wooky looks like a funny creature with heavy footsteps.  He might be a big furry thug and yes, he probably is a bit thick, taking all that time to say one word.  “S….L….O….W!” but, just think what you must look like to him.  Here he is trying to go about his business and enjoy life when all around him everybody is hustling and bustling.  No wonder that poor Wooky is driven to howl.  He’s not surrounded by people anymore, he’s surrounded by nanoseconds swirling about him rushing here, rushing everywhere, rushing every moment.

Wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, shower, change, tidy, go out, do work, make money, spend money, see people, see things, drive cars, catch trains and buses, power-walk, cook, eat food, sleep…… 

What is a nanosecond compared to a swirling sunset?

What is a nanosecond compared to a wide eyed blue sky? 

“S….L…..O….W!”

There he is, there’s that Wooky.  He’s stopped, he’s sitting down and… he’s just sitting there.  He’s watching the sky and he’s smiling. 

For this moment and maybe this whole year he’ll sit there.  This is his time to feel his breath drifting in and out of his body.   He watches it dance away and drift in and out and all about the world around him.  The world that makes him breathe in and sigh.

That Wooky’s alive.  He knows he is but, he wonders, what do you know?

Each day, I promised, I would play with the ball. 

I thought it was going to be easy enough to play with a ball, but the next day I was perplexed.  What should I do with this ball?  I’m not a child, I’m a woman and I really don’t have the time or inclination to throw a ball about the place.  Besides, it’s not safe throwing a crystal ball around, it might break something.   

I decided to do the only thing I could think of doing. I decided to sit and look at it.  Sitting outside on a blue sky morning the ball shone in my hands.  I could see flashes of light as I turned the ball this way and that.  Sometimes I saw the tiniest rainbows of colour at the edges of the light.  Is this what the little girl meant by other worlds?   Here was a universe of colour in a small ball of light.  Perhaps I could look at these colours every day and paint pictures with them in my mind.

That first day I saw colours swirled together in rich, gleeful hues.  Colours joined forces before my eyes to make new colours after colours after colours.  It was like a giggling colourfield.  I lost track; I felt giddy, but confused.  There were no scenic vistas, no great visions.  Should I be expecting more?  What is it with all these colours?

The next day I saw the same thing, colours after colours after colours.  Is that it?  What about the gateways to other worlds?  This happened day after day until finally I’d had enough.  So much for a magic ball taking me to other worlds, all I saw were colours, what sort of science fiction fantasy experience is this?  I got out an old paint set that hadn’t been used in years.  I looked for the same colours that I’d seen reflected in the ball.   Maybe if I used those colours I’d be able to paint a stunning painting.  Maybe if I closed my eyes the painting might even paint itself, after all, I’d been gazing into a magic ball.  Maybe this is what the little girl meant, she was going to turn me in to a great artist.  Then I realized that the colours in my paint box were nothing like the sparkling colours in the ball and I got so mad because not even a great artist could make the same colours as I’d seen in that ball.  I was angry, I was furious, I was speechless, then I did something completely unexpected.  I sprayed the paint out crazily all over the ball.  So much for magic doors I thought “Take this!”  I threw a large dollop of crimson on the ball.  “That’s what I think of magic balls”, a spurt of vermillion green, “can’t your colours even group together neatly like a rainbow?” a belch of  blue, “you don’t even look magic, you’re just a ball, what am I supposed to do?  If you want me to make some meaning out of this you have to give me a hint!” violent bursts of orange and yellow and pink.  “AAAHHH!!”   Then I stopped.  The ball looked amazing, well, almost amazing.  The colours in the ball had mixed with the colours on the ball to create a startling kaleidoscope of light and colour.  Suddenly, I had an idea.  I cleaned the paint off the ball and sat down in front of my kitchen window.  This window looked out unceremoniously at the next door neighbour’s side wall and this time when I painted, I started smiling.

Creativity is not about expectations.  It is not about being what people want you to be or expect you should be.  It is about playing, being spontaneous, being a square peg in a round hole, or in this case a beautiful, magnificent, marvelous round ball of colour in a square window.

Oh, but this particular troll used to chuckle about his life all the time.  He loved to surprise people with his strange colouring and if anyone screamed as some gentle folk invariably do when faced with a disagreeable green and blue and grey creature well then he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.  A most disagreeable troll he was let me tell you.

That was where all the problems started.  His laugh was infinitely horrible.  It disturbed the whole of the valley with its guffawing and wheezing and huffing and chuckling.  Really, it was loud and rambunctious and awfully BAD.   Nobody liked that Troll’s laugh, least of all me.

For years we endured the disagreeable troll and his disagreeable laugh until one day he, at last, met an echo. 

You see, echos are rare in our valley, our air being so pure and light, but on this particular day all the frogs from miles around were gathering for their first annual croak croak festival. Its affect on the air in the valley was later decided to be an endurable side effect of such an event which also, as fate had it, cleansed the intestines of all us fairy folk.  Amazing isn’t it what a few croaks can do, but, PLEASE excuse me from this story for just a moment because I urgently wish to thoroughly, categorically and utterly deny the unsavoury and rather distasteful allegations made by the trolls of our valley that the second side effect of cleansed innards was in any way associated with the first side affect of air pollution…..really!!  Ahum, shall we move on with the story of such a troll then…

Anyway, on this day a lilting echo flew through the valley and passed right by that disagreeable troll who got to hear his own laugh for the very first time in his life.   The troll was shocked, tortured, miffed and whipped up in to a frenzy of distress.  For it was finally on that day that he knew, without a doubt that he had a most disagreeable laugh.

Have you ever seen an embarrassed troll?  They’re very rare let me assure you, even rarer than echoes in these parts.  A troll is not inclined to consider any single other being but themselves so when this momentous development did in fact occur it stunned us all.  That troll was so ashamed of the sound of his own horrible laugh that he shut completely up, it was truly amazing.  We fairy folk quietly jumped in a gleeful unison of yippees and woosparklyhooos. 

Life in the valley was as blissful as we could ever dream it could be, free from that horrible guffawing our ears could feast on the gentle sounds of our quiet little lives.  Oh, if only I didn’t have to tell you the rest, I so wanted to tell you a story with a happy ending, but I’m afraid, there is more to come of this tale. 

As it occurs with a troll with no laugh there’s something inside, not a heart surely, surely troll’s don’t have a heart at all, perhaps some sense of …humbug?…hmmm?  Whatever it was it didn’t fair well without laughter.   It festered and bubbled and blistered, ick. Laughter turned silent and stamped downwards can start to look green it seems.  Not the bright green we like here in our valley, but the slimey dark green of the marshes and the mire.  The very kind of dark slimy grey green that starts to smell and so he did, PUTRID.  Two weeks later that festering troll was stinking out the whole valley. Truly it was more disagreeable than could be.  An onerous troll is bad enough, but an odorous troll, that is truly unbearable.

What could we do?   We had to do something.  We couldn’t have this, goodness me we could hardly breathe.

It seemed life in our peaceful valley was destined for disaster.  We all gathered together to try to think of a plan.  We tried to spray our fairy dust around the valley but his smell was too strong it quickly returned.  We considered banishing him but fairies can not be cruel and we knew in his state he’d be beaten and battered outside so that couldn’t happen either, sadly.  We tried wearing nose plugs but they were distinctly uncomfortable and clearly wouldn’t do.  Life in the valley was looking bleak.  (I do have photos of those dark days but fairies look so bad in nose plugs that I’m afraid the photos are classified material, sorry.)  Never mind, because at last we had a breakthrough.  It’s true, Gwen the Lilly thought it up.   She suggested we put him in an echo chamber, a marvelous idea if only an echo would agree to it – but, would you?  No, that was never going to happen, BUT it inspired the rest of us to realize a truly perfect solution.  Ahah! We could give the troll a fairy house all his own.    I told you we fairy folk are discreet and so are our houses.  After all they are built for us and by us so they’re very hush hush……shhhh, if you’re very quiet you might just hear that wicked old troll inside one now.  Of course normally a troll would have nothing to do with such fineries as a fairy house but this time it was perfect for he could take it with him wherever he went (we showed him our special way of carrying it around in the twinkling of our eyes and how we could then open it up with a wink) and whenever he wanted to laugh he need only step inside – and so he did.  Soon he was back to his old shade of green, laughing and wheezing and huffing and chuckling to his heart’s content, ….there now, can you hear it? That silence? Shhh, if you listen very hard I’m sure you can.  That’s a very, very content troll – as are we, at last, all us delicate fairy folk in our own dear, sweet smelling valley.