You will miss the mundane

 

I can so relate to this excerpt. I am an ardent lover of the mundane, it defines me like nothing else does. 😊 Maybe because I take nothing for granted. Every change of the light is a gift.

Jack Gilbert also expressed it so beautifully, in this poem:

"I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace.

You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible.

There is something to loving the mundane--Thornton Wilder, I believe, dealt with this, to great and roaring cynicism. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness.

People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness."

Alec Guinness, Interview with James Grissom

You have more than enough. Always have.

 

Abundance

By Amy Schmidt
in memory of Mary Oliver

It's impossible to be lonely
when you're zesting an orange.

Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room 
fills with fruit.

Look around: you have
more than enough. 
Always have.

You just didn't notice
until now.

Gardening

 

For my dear friend Reena, gardener, lover of gardens, creator of beauty

"Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. 

There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way.

Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Maria Popova

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

Photo: Flower of the Cannon Ball Tree, Nagalinga Pushpa. The flowers grow out of the trunk of the tree.

The Love of your Fate

 

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. 

If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. 

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. 

Joseph Campbell, Book: Reflections on the Art of Living (I have yet to read this book)

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Audible Audiobook