“We don’t laugh because we are happy, we are happy because we laugh”. William James.

In Ernest Kurtz’ book, The Spirituality of Imperfection , he points out that the words “human,” “humility,” and “humour” all share a common Indo-European root, ghôm, best translated by the English word “humus.” Humus is vegetable matter reduced to its most basic form.

In our evolution, humour was a signal that a situation is safe. Laughter breaks tension by making stressful situations less threatening.  Jokes are often heard at funeral because gallows humour helps us deal with sadness.

Humour brings us down to earth and makes us more resilient- patients recovering from surgery who watch comedies request twenty five percent less pain medication. Soldiers who make jokes deal better with stress. People who laugh naturally six months after losing a spouse cope better. Couples who laugh together are more likely to stay married.

It also lowers our heart rate and relaxes our muscles!

“A merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Proverbs 17:22

In the end our presence is all we have – the quality of that presence needs to be minded. In our busy daily lives it can be diluted.  We are there but not there – distracted, maybe by technology – externally present, miles away- our minds secretly elsewhere.

John O’Donohue,  his book Divine Beauty, has a lovely piece on the power of our presence which is particularly pertinent for parents and teachers. “It has been shown, that when there are two harps tuned to the same frequency in a room, one a large harp and the other smaller, if a chord is struck in the bigger harp it fills and infuses the little harp with the grandeur and beauty of its resonance and brings it into tuneful harmony. Then the little harp sounds out its own tune in its own voice. This is one of the unnoticed ways in which a child learns to become him or herself.

Perhaps the most powerful way parents and teachers rear children is through the quality of their presence and the atmosphere that pertains in the in-between times of each day. Unconsciously the child absorbs this and hopefully parents send out enough tuneful spirit for the child to come into harmony with her own voice.”

One of the greatest issues facing us, is our profound and painful sense of disconnection – we have become disconnected from ourselves, from our bodies, our interior world, disconnected from nature, isolated from our neighbour and from God. This is leading us into more and more destructive behaviour patterns. I once heard the saying, “if you want to be happy, get connected.” There is a truth in that statement.

D.H Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, recognized the serious consequences of being cut off from nature and from our own dark, secret root system.

“Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off

from his union with the sun and the earth.

This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots,

because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars and

love is grinning mockery, because, poor blossom,

we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected

it to keep on blooming in our civilized  vase on the table”

We have to get back in contact with our secret root system; according to Lawrence we need to make a ‘detour’ back toward the primal state, in order to revitalize and invigorate civilization, to recover the mysteries of nature and the sacredness of the body. Get reconnected.

Our lack of organic connection to the whole of life takes its toll. Our inner ecology, the ecology of the soul can be unbalanced and even destroyed by the disconnection we experience.