A Season for Miracles

Yellow light at dawn.

It is possible to conduct an archaeological dig through a life using many different vehicles.  I noticed this most markedly after my mother’s death.  As I handled her belongings, I felt like I was leaping from lily pad to lily pad going backward through time.  The deeper into her files, the farther under her bed, the more remote in the attic, the more I discovered about my mother’s past.  She was revealed to me by what she saved, the bits and pieces of her lifetime that were most important to her.  A poem my sister wrote, an apology from my father on a piece of paper from a yellow pad with one word on it; “Sorry,” and a Mother’s Day card I made her in 1963 -- urging her to rest and let me do the dishes all day. I have come to have a deeper appreciation for my own trail.  

Today, I was going through a leather notebook and found an essay I wrote in November,   1985.  Do you remember what you were doing in ’85?  An excerpt appears below.  Perhaps, what surprises me most is that what I wrote is seems just as relevant today as it did almost thirty years ago. 

It’s not the season for miracles.  Webster’s Dictionary defines miracle as “a wonder or something wonderful.”  What then is a “wonder?” Webster’s reports that wonder is “that emotion which is excited by something that arrests the attention by its inexplicableness.”  When reduced to those terms, I was struck by how many fill my days.  They are tucked into every moment.  All I have to do is to live, love, feel with a childlike heart and they are revealed.

o a colorful rainbow dancing in the spray from a garden hose.o the rapid, steady heartbeat of my cat as she sleeps.o a pregnant woman swelling with new life.o a stubborn dandelion pushing its way through a crack in the sidewalk.o the kiss of yellow light as dawn breaks.o a spider’s web in perfect, intricate design.o the lyrical music of my wind chimes.o the salty sting of sea air in the winter.

These things, both so small and so grand, excite in me a sense of wonder and a sense of joy.  This familiar emotion surges, then ebbs, but I carry the wonder with me like the lingering scent of a favorite perfume.  Every time I take in a miracle, the joy that fills me seems to touch the people around me.  From each tiny miracle, a wellspring of love is born.  Every gift I give comes back to me, the love I share embraces me.  It is from these observations that I understand that life is an open season for miracles.