Life is funny. In India, a doctor developed a form of yoga which involves laughing. People laugh for no reason, whatsoever. Imagine that. They don't sit around and wait to be entertained, they just laugh because it feels so good. Research talks about the ways in which laughter improves heart health, and overall frame of mind.

Laughter is not always available in every recount of history. Sometimes, history is downright grim. It's easy to assume that life can be too much. Once upon a time, I did. As a teenager, growing up in Texas, I found my heroine in the way I understood the stories about West Seattle's Frances Farmer. The spirit of anarchy and chaos and "Life is Unfair" seemed to be calling me to Seattle. Little did I know I was being called here for an entirely different reason, and I would eventually learn great acceptance and joy in part through meditating on Frances' life and traveling her path, years later, in the field like an archeologist on a dig.

I decided I would write the first "real" biography about her (and of course the best, for I was young), as everything I read about her seemed to be reading about her, rather than reading from her. Journeying all the way to Indianapolis, where she died, I heard that this dark figure from history died with her hair swept up in a buoyant blonde ponytail and her face filled with joy, like a child's.

"She looked exactly like a little girl," recalled her friend Gina Woods. "She was filled with laughter and joy."

Another close friend named Moselle Schaeffer said, "She looked so happy. She said, 'One of these days, my soul is going to fly right out of this window, just like a bird.'"

She also threw great parties, hosted poetry readings and had what they call a "mischievous spirit."

I was stunned. Absolutely astonished. There was no way in the world that the books and movies about her which said she'd been ruined had been wrong. I began to look over all my notes, and noticed how small details reported in previous versions of her life were off, so was it possible they'd missed the grand theme as well? Was it possible that someone who had been institutionalized and treated badly could be happy about life?

Unless we submit to it like water, swimming, life can be a bit of a trick. Things happen. Is anything truly unfair? Is anything not meant to happen which does? Is it possible that everything has a benefit, and if we relax about our challenges, they cease to be challenges. Of course, it's nice when everything goes our way, and yet, have we not learned and been as enriched when things do not go our way. These days, I am viewing life as my dance partner, and trusting that life has a greater sense of what it takes to keep me well and happy than I do.

I wanted to write about Frances Farmer as a straight-ahead biographer, and did that, and yet, when I looked at my 350-page annotated text, I felt so little. Nothing about her essence seemed to shine through. Yes, she was a survivor, but far more interesting and powerful than that, she was a woman who made peace with her past and opened to the present.

I've pulled out the project again as part of a series of biographies on Washington state characters written for eighth graders, as they are the ones who study our state's history in school. This time, Frances' story comes through as she is writing her famous essay called God Dies. She is 15. This essay made her rich ($100), respected and notorious. She ended up a movie star, a theater star and a woman who was living at home at age 30, and then she spent five years in an institution.

Her life is a veritable template of the light and the dark, an astonishing glimpse into the depths and heights possible in a single human life, and yet, the reason I write about her now is simply because despite all the angst presentation in art of her life, this woman knew how to kick back and how to enjoy her life. It's funny to me that now that I am a mother and have lived a lot, I can sit back and accept Frances' life without suffering or worry, but rather, with a calm grace. I can accept any life in this way, including my own; what is there, anyway, but acceptance?

If we want to be loved unconditionally, then we can begin by loving life unconditionally. For me, the key to history is often just this: history is made by individuals, and individuals are often filled with stories and judgment and resistance to life or insistence on getting their own way, when in fact, only life knows what is best and there is nothing greater than walking among other humans and feeling harmony, comfort and service.

It's funny: there really is no past any longer; even history is a story of the past, and it no longer exists before us. We are free every single day to begin again, to create, to laugh, to love, to embrace one another, to go deeper into what it means to be a true friend to ourselves, our loved ones, our community and our world and perhaps sometimes we meditate on others' lives for unexpected reasons.

Frances' life is the last place I expected to find grace and acceptance, and yet, years later, she is a delightful, vibrant character in this biography series and one of the wisest imagined people I know.

She also makes me laugh.

Lesley Holdcroft is a West Seattle freelance writer who may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com