Making a "living" and the pursuit of happiness

Already on day 7 of my residency at Homestead National Monument. I can't believe that's halfway done. But in those 7 days, I've packed my brain so full of prairie plants and birds and Willa Cather and thoughts about how I want to live...and how home might be a much larger place than the physical structures we find shelter within.

This morning, walking the prairie, I was thinking about the phrase "making a living" and the Declaration of Independence. Particularly, I was thinking about this phrase that we all know so well: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

So we've got the right to live and be free, but we don't have the right to just naturally BE happy. We've got the right to pursue happiness. And that's where sometimes I think I've gotten pretty tripped up. What exactly is this happiness that I'm trying to pursue? And how does that tie in to the idea of "making a living?" Are our lives too cluttered up with stuff, as I heard Dan Deffenbaugh say yesterday at the Willa Cather conference, for us to see our happiness and our living as part of something larger than ourselves? Perhaps a true home?