Miracles everywhere
and five things
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A song I’m loving:
1 — “Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.” Thich Nhat Hanh
We may not notice these miracles, but they are always here. I’ve been tracking miracles lately — noticing how open my heart is to welcoming them, to witnessing them, to letting them exist even now, even when chaos seems, at times, to be so much bigger. I’ve also been noticing how easily I can turn away from them, shut them out, not let them linger because goodness, it can be harder to stay with the good than it is to stay with the grief sometimes.
And yet Thich Nhat Hanh shares truth; they are always here. Some miracles I’ve held onto recently: gathering with folks locally to write postcards to representatives. The bouquet my daughter picked me from our garden. Reflecting on sixteen years of loving my partner. Cat snores. Unexpected rain; unexpected sunshine. A perfect used bookshop find. Watching my daughter play with my best friend’s son. Moments of peace in meditation. Holding my center in a difficult conversation. A hawk landing on my car. Wildflowers covering the hills. One breath. Then another.
I’m asking myself, how can I stay more open to seeing the miracles here? How can I let them linger a little longer? How might the miracle become a source of steadiness amid the unknown? Could staying close to the miracles make it a little easier to also stay close to what I value, to facing and tending to the world, to being who I want to be? Miracle as guide. Miracle as mirror. Miracle as anchor. Miracle as tether. Miracle as map. Miracle as an oracle of remembrance.
2 — My husband and I had a date day to the SF MOMA this week. I had been so eager to see Ruth Asawa’s retrospective, an artist I’ve long admired. I found myself in tears multiple times as we walked through the expansive offering of her life’s work, awed by the expansiveness of her art practice. I was particularly moved by the way she took ordinary life objects and turned them into something beautiful, something special: line drawings of a bunch of bananas, chrysanthemums, a bowl of cherries; wire turned into awe; clay turned into sacred object. Her studio was in her home living room, where she raised six children. “I’ve always had my studio in the house,” she said, “because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me—or a peanut butter sandwich.”
Ruth’s practice of making art from the ordinary, and doing so not away from her family but surrounded by them, reminded me of the way I sometimes write to you with my daughter curled up next to me, talking to me about the newsletter she wants to write some day (“I’ll write a newsletter about horses!”, she says). It reminded me that making is more often about the practice than the outcome — more about weaving creativity into daily life than needing to escape daily life to create. And it reminded me of my younger self, the one who filled journals with art and words and poems, the one who the local photo store always called when they got shipments of expired Polaroid film in, the one who made songs and collages, the one for whom making was an inherent part of living. I miss her, and Ruth’s exhibit mirrored to me that she is still inside me somewhere, asking me to let art be woven into the life I have now, on the crowded kitchen table, with interruption as a sign of all the love that’s here.
3 — Do you feel like you’re squeezed between a Before and an After? Like you’re somewhere swirling in the middle, not quite on the other side of whatever alchemy is occurring but still moving through the portal, still in it, like you’re being cooked by life? Do you feel like there might not actually be an Other Side… like this weird and ineffable time might just be part of the flow of being a human? Do you feel like you’re not quite sure how to recognize Who You Are right now, not because you’re far away but because everything you needed to be is slowly falling away and someone new and unfamiliar is emerging? Do you feel like you’re shedding old skins and not quite sure how to inhabit the rawness that’s left in the shedding’s wake? Do you feel like being in the world without so much protection and shielding is so scary, yet also makes so much more possible? Do you feel like the ways you’ve long identified yourself no longer fit, and it’s taking a while to figure out what does fit? Do you feel like the truest parts of you are just now able to be born into presence, welcomed into belonging? Do you feel the grief of how unfamiliar your truest essence sometimes is, while also feeling a swell of gratitude for getting to meet all that’s been hiding underneath the layers you so lovingly built over your lifetime? Do you feel sort of like a newborn again, learning how to live in the way you were always meant to? If so, you’re not alone.
4 — The more tender we can be with our own process of learning and unlearning, becoming and unbecoming, facing and feeling, the more the river of ourselves will unfold and flow, rather than staying stuck or dammed. This unfolding can be so disorienting at times, and yet there are banks we can lean on, rails we can build on the sides of the current, sources of steadiness we can turn toward when it all feels choppy. Thank goodness for this… for this unaloneness in the all-ness.
5 — This life holds so much. May we hold ourselves and each other gently. And may the miracles keep revealing themselves; may we keep finding them amid it all.
Thank you, as always, for being here.
△ Alexander Chee on creative resistance
△ Community resilience efforts
△ Women are the first environment
△ An album that’s been playing on repeat
△ Everyone I know is worried about work
△ Kiese Laymon and the continued gifts he gives
△ The transcendent retrospective of Ruth Asawa at the SF MOMA
With care,
Lisa
#3… a resounding, exhaled chorus of yes. Thank you for the reminder that we’re not alone in this. I immediately began to write this morning, in the afterglow of feeling seen. How lovely to be in the company of those who declare their need of miracles and the marvel of having eyes to see them.
I love reading your posts. They are so heartfelt and lyrical.