18 April 2022
everyday miracles
Unraveling events like this capture my attention repeatedly throughout my days. It’s part of why I thought, for a while, that I was a touch autistic. Like watching the way the bubbles congregate on top of tub water. Or how fire separates from itself as it lifts into the sky. Or the manner in which embers glow then fade, then glow again. Or the play of wind at the corner of a stone fence: how it strikes up leaves to a cyclone. Even the way my coffee swirls its cream.
It's like my mind is unzipping the nature of that event, seeing the press and pull of each particle – of air, water, solid – to create a pattern, a design, so pleasing I am rapt.
How often do these events escape our attention? Do they not deserve it – all of it – even if just briefly? They are magic. They are the definition of beauty, nature doing as nature does according to natural laws – physics, biology, chemistry.
A student in our class wrote the other day about falling on the black lava rock in Hawaii and scraping up his hand. He wrote about the pain, about the guilt and embarrassment of letting himself get hurt this way. Yet all I could think of was the myriad amazing ways nature reacted to the injury: the nerves and pain receptors firing, the blood flowing to avert infection and jump-start coagulation, the way his family sprung into action to help. I was in awe – my feeling on his behalf was not one of guilt or shame. It was amazement. What a story!
So maybe, today, take a breath, release focus, and just be. Witness the tiny daily miracles around you. Appreciate them. Live in them.
~meg