In 2002, I attended my brother's wedding.
It was a beautiful event, full of love, wonderful food,
lots of dancing, and the Olive Harvest coincided with my brother's wedding.
And I had never experienced the Olive Harvest before, ever.
After the wedding, my grandmother and my cousins And my siblings,
we all gathered around and harvested the trees in front of our family's home.
And so we were fishing out the leaves.
We were sitting around chatting.
We were dragging tarps full of olives that were plopping down.
My grandmother, she would sing songs.
We would share our stories.
We would talk about our lives sitting around these large tarps of olives that are for the olive press.
She taught us what it means to be a good steward to the land.
She's the one who showed us how to make sure that they don't get crushed on the way, you know,
as we put them in buckets to be delicate and gentle and tender with all the olives that we were preparing for the olive press.
And I can remember just having this communal collectivist experience that left such an indelible mark on me.
because we don't hear much about the love and the joy that comes through something so sacred as the olive harvest in Palestine.
It wasn't until I had children of my own that I started writing the story, Helluva's Gifts.
So the idea for it was deep inside of me for over 20 years.
Welcome to the Science of Happiness.