There is a quote from poet Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day that gets shared a lot on social media:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
But it is the two lines that precede these two oft quoted ones that for me gives these lines their soul-piercing power. After describing how she has spent her summer day feeding sugar to a grasshopper and strolling through the fields, it feels as if the poet pauses and looks us, her reader, in the eyes maybe over a steaming cup of coffee or tea, takes a deep breath and asks,
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Like the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, who reminds us of the ultimate end of our days because we are all like wisps of smoke, here for but a little while, Oliver pushes us to consider how we will spend our days. These are the kinds of words that inspire me, that encourage me to consider the beauty and the wonder contained in these, my seemingly ordinary days. Like Oliver and the writer of Ecclesiastes, I believe there are gifts nestled within the days we are given and often I like to remind myself each morning during my quiet reflection and prayer time to head into each new day with my heart set on finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of my life.
As I wrote about yesterday, I believe what Ralph Waldo Emerson and others after him have said, that what we look for we will find. Sometimes, upon first awakening, when my mind is still foggy with sleep and my thoughts have yet to fully form within me I experience groggy moments of disappointment before the day even gets underway. But, one of the former and familiar habits I have returned to recently is the practice of Morning Pages, an idea I learned about more than 25 years ago in the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Basically, these pages are a thought-clearing brain dump over three notebook pages. They are not a journal and they are not intended to be re-read. Rather, these blank white pages are an invitation to pour out the jumble of sleepy thoughts, like the ones that might suggest I am facing nothing more than an ordinary, mundane day.
As I move my pen across the page, I find my heart and mind shift from those unformed foggy and sleepy thoughts that want to tell me my life is of little importance and filled only with dull and tedious tasks ahead. As those thoughts are cleared out, my mind makes room for creativity and intentional thought. This is the place where life takes on its meaning and purpose for the day. This is the place where I recall who I truly am and tend to find myself writing words that match Oliver’s as I write about heading into the day to seek out the extraordinary and the sacred.
Life with my two teenagers allows me glimpses of those very things. Their spark of curiosity ignites my own mind and presses me toward discovering the best version of myself—in my writing, in allowing myself to dream, in appreciating the gift of small steps and new beginnings. Because that is what each day provides each of us. And those Morning Pages and these two remarkable young women help to align my mind and my day toward the wonder and the extraordinary of each day. They are my reminders that what we seek we find more of in our lives. Within these two young women, I see often the extraordinary—in their eyes, in their smiles, in their sketches, their art, their stories, their poetry. In their very beings. Every day, they bring me joy and inspire gratitude. And that is always something extraordinary to me.