Every day on earth is astonishing, with or without your noticing.
~ Unknown
You wake up in the morning, check your phone, freshen up, gulp a cup of coffee, check your phone again and scurry out for another gruelling day of work. Days like this, repeated over and over again, can leave us not only exhausted but feeling numbed to the fact that it is a great privilege to be alive on this earth, to be given the chance to experience beauty near and far. Below is a selection of prose and poems that remind us that every day is wholly gratuitous, and if we notice enough, even ordinary things can be interesting.
I begin with a poetic quote from the talented writer, Anne Dillard.
The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?
~ Anne Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Canterbury Press, 2011.
Next, a wonderful line from the American poet and short story writer, Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) on the riches from paying attention.
If you look long enough at anything, it will become extremely interesting. If you look very long at anything, it will become rich, manifold, fascinating.”
From ‘Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine’ in Selected Poems, Summer Knowledge, New Directions Publishing Corp, 1938.
What should we be paying attention to? The following haiku by Sodo Yamaguchi (1643-1716) gives a hint, and is one of my favourites. Read it twice.
Here in my spring hut
There is nothing.
There is everything.
This deceptively simple poem holds a profound truth – that there is much value in the ordinary and simple things which we often overlook due to apathy or neglect. Although this is a 17th century poem, its message still rings true today, perhaps even more so, at a time when we have so much of everything, yet everything seems so fleeting and shallow.
Next, a beautiful poem by Amy Lowell, a leading poet of the early 20th century. It captures the same sentiment as Yamaguchi’s haiku using the image of a bouquet.
Marigold and Poppy
Sunlight,
Three marigolds,
And a dusky purple poppy pod.
Out of these I made a beautiful world.
Will you have them –
Brightness,
Gold,
And a sleep with dreams?
They are brittle pleasures certainly,
But where can you find better?
Roses are not noted for their endurance
And only thirty days are June.
~ Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
As always, nature is an unrivalled source of inspiration for poets and artists seeking “beauty inexhaustible in its complexity” as Anne Dillard puts it, or as the next poem by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) exhorts, to cry over beautiful things, knowing that beauty, not even in nature, lasts.
Autumn Movement
I cried over beautiful things knowing
no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflowers yellow is a scarf
at the neck of the copper sunburned
woman, the mother of the year, the
taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow
is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the
northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one last.
I’ll round off this post with two poems of mine. The first poem speaks of unlikely sources of beauty in a big city, and the second is a call to embrace the grace and beauty of ordinary days, which are most days.
City Symphony
Tip-tap of footsteps on the
pavements. A truck hisses
as it reverses from an alley.
An ambulance siren rips
the air. A train rumbles, then
screeches to a halt. In the
lull between the pulses,
two birds on a wire singing in
short, descending notes.
Out of nothing,
a symphony.
Ordinary Days
One day, you will be the reluctant
philosopher. You will look back and
say to yourself that the hurrying
was pointless, and the gatherings
facile and depleting. One day, you will be
too weak to even swing a mop. You
will eat with pain and weep yourself
to sleep. Then you will remember the
ordinary days, lit with sunlight
and starlight, and wish for
one more day like this, and wear
this plain rock of a day like it was
a rare and precious stone.