The Extraordinary Ordinary

You and I live in an astoundingly magical and extraordinarily miraculous world. When I first went scuba diving in Hawaii, I was astounded at the variety of colors and patterns on the fish. They were more eye-catching than New York designers! I also love to take a magnifying glass out into nature and look at the fractals in leaves, the geometric patterns on insects, the mandala of flower petals, and the teaming life in a dew drop.

Also, no two sunsets are the same. I try to walk every day at Heritage Park close to sunset. It is on the bluff above Lake Washington and has a vast view across to Seattle and onto the Olympic mountains. A few days ago, with the sky ablaze with color, a man stopped me and expressed his absolute awe at the beauty of the sky. We talked for a while, sharing heart to heart the absolute majesty of life. And I thought this man was a stranger! As Helen Keller once said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

That night I came across a poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes called Transfiguration:

It began as ordinarily
as a brilliant sunrise ought to:
huge, lazy salmon swam through the trees
flaming on the horizon,
the eyebrows of the eastern sky
raised as if it was about to say
something magnificent,
and then the flamboyant sun,
everything on fire with flushed cheeks,
everything a gleaming treasure,
you just wanted to take its face in your hands
and kiss it—
and then a cloud, and it went suddenly grey,
gold and peach drained
into shabby bits and shadows,
the poorly erased side of a barn,
the scumbled trunks of trees,
the colors of dead grass and sidewalks.
And that—that—was the miracle:
all that light pressed into dull things,
all that glory shrunk down
into ordinariness,
all of heaven hidden in earth,
something vast contained,
in what I now behold
moment by moment:
the hand, the table, the door,
the person at the door.

Look around you. Everywhere you look is the extraordinary ordinary! And if you are still stuck in ordinariness, know all of this has come out of stardust! Our earth is made up of atoms that were once a part of a star and when stars supernova, they gave forth into space all the building blocks of our planet.  I have a favorite rock in my garden that says everything is made out of recycled stardust. What is the amazing intelligence that took Stardust and created all of this? Let your mind be blown.

As Thich Nhat Hahn said,

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or on thin air but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child – our own two eyes. All is a miracle!”

To unhook from the trap of ordinariness, dance in the rain; lie under a tree and look up into its majesty;   hug someone you don’t know; lie on the earth on a partly cloudy day and watch the dance of clouds like you did when you were young; look for at least one thing you can do every day to lift yourself out of your narrow focus.

You can also get out of town and find a patch of dark sky and be stunned by the grandeur of the universe. You can see around 10,000 stars on a clear night but there are more stars than there are grains of sand on every beach of the earth!! Or give yourself the gift of going to Great Basin National Park in Nevada or Death Valley in CA and go there during the Perseid Meteor shower, which happens every year from July 17 to Aug 24, with its peak being Aug. 12^th. As you open up to the grandeur of the universe, recognize yourself as a part of something bigger than yourself.

Every time you lift yourself out of the prison of your mind that sees everything as ordinary, you become a part of the healing that is coming out of this time of chaos.

Will you join me in becoming a place of celebration rather than a place of struggle?

Offerings:

Are you interested in digging deeper into topics like this? I invite you to listen to my new radio show episode: The Great Healer of Attention. It will air on Thursday, February 29th at 5am and 5pm PST. Listen HERE. After the 29th, it will be available on demand along with every other topic I’ve covered. Please feel free to explore the archive HERE.

Don’t forget to save the date and register for the next Free Live Call: The Magic of Acceptance on March 12th at 5:30pm PDT. We have all bought into the belief that if something is not the way we want it to be, we must fix it, ignore it, get rid of it, or rise above it, not realizing this is an endless game of struggle. Join Mary in exploring the art of acceptance and how to bring its magic into your life. The event will last about an hour. (Can’t make it? You can still participate. Click the link to learn how) Learn more and Register Here