Oneness of Smiles in Willamette

It was the hundredth birthday of the town of Willamette, Oregon.
The b-day party was at a park in what is now called West Lynn.
I didn’t wanna be there.
Crowds overwhelm me – too much input.
And that morning i had a major attitude.
Not a bad attitude, exactly – but most definitely not a good one.
But i wanted to be with my friend and that’s where he went, so there i was.

We watched some kids perform in a dance competition.
For a while I paid attention to their smiles.
Most of the kids wore the perfunctory fake smile, as they fretted about getting their steps right.
A few of ‘em seemed to be totally digging what they were doing.

My pal and i wandered onward.
Soon i noticed that those kids had the only smiles in the park.
People looked just plain glum! What’s up with that?!
“Hey man,” i says to my bro’, “how come these blokes ain’t smilin’?”
Now, my friend is a new thought practitioner, and them folks come up with unexpected stuff sometimes.
He says, “They’re not smiling because you’re not smiling, Jonathan.”
I said, “Dude. I’m one person out of a hundred here. How would i affect all them? Besides, this is their party. They don’t gotta smile if they don’t wanna. But hey..sure might be more fun for ‘em if they did.”
“So smile, Jonathan.” My friend gets on a track sometimes.
That’s okay. I get on a track too. “No.”

Well… i kinda mustered up a forced, one-sided, little stretch of a corner of my face.
More like a sneer maybe. Didn’t let my buddy see this of course.
Eventually i got it shaped into something that almost passed for a upside-down frown.
Just then some guy a hundred feet away grinned at his friend for just a split second.
Hmm…That was a funny coincidence.
Also by coincidence, my fake smile got a little easier to fake.
This appealed to the instigator in me. So i put on a big cheshire cat grin.
It was funny ~ folks far away started smilin’ as much as people close up.
As if folks didn’t have to actually see me grinnin’ ‘fore they got affected.
One of the vendors did see me grinnin’. She started smilin’ extra too.
It was ON!

By the time we made one round of the fair a half hour later…

Almost all of the people in that park were happily similing.
Now the place had the aire of a town b-day party.
Harumph.

“A smile is something you can give away and give away..
..and end up with more than when you started.” ~ Debbie Strider

Moral: new consciousness practitioners seem to know stuff about Oneness.
= D