Your Daily Miracle: Japanese maple lit by sun--"Open your doors and look abroad!"
This morning as Charley and I walked, clods of icy snow fell on our heads from tree branches, and by the time we rounded the corner for home, the sun was illuminating every drop of melted snow. Everything shone--we were walking into glory--and in the earth the crocus, the tiny iris, the budded daffodils were singing a steady bass line to the shrilling sopranos of the glittering tree branches.
Now it is grey again, and chilly and fireless indoors. Merry still sleeps upstairs, the latest victim to The Cold. And I have returned to work, which is varied and interesting. Today, it's research on Indian pangolins and Bengali poets, including Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Asian person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. At the end of this brief post, I (and the Poetry Foundation) gift you with a wonderful poem-note penned by Tagore to you, the reader, a hundred years hence.
The sun is playing games this morning--and we vitamin-D starved folk are a rapt audience, eagerly craving the warmth of its capricious rays. It peeks out again and suddenly I hear the happy shrieks of the neighbor's wee boys across the street, where they are running across the sodden lawn. I can see their coats flash in the lower branches of the tall spruce and then behind the waxy leaves of the giant rhododendron. Their visiting Grandma wanders about, collecting poop that the family's elderly, kind golden lab has been depositing here and there.
I remember mornings like these, when the most pressing matter in the day was whether or not nap time would be observed; what picture books we would read together; which show we'd watch after nap (Kipper or The Wiggles--please, let it be Kipper!), and who wanted peanut butter with their apple slices. I am bettered by a thousand such gentle mornings!
And the glory from the melting snow and the sun--so temporal as well, yet so beautiful--I'm better for taking it in while I stood on the porch, rubbing mud from Charley with a big blue towel. I have been bedazzled by the glorious Japanese maple, glittering with sunlit water droplets--and I will never be the same.
What changed you this morning? What was your moment of beauty that, as Tagore writes in his poem (below) will send its "glad voice across a hundred years?"
*
At the beginning of "The Gardener 85," Tagore asks,
Here is the second stanza of that lovely poem (from The Poetry Foundation):
Again, you really should read the poem in its entirety by visiting The Poetry Foundation.
Now it is grey again, and chilly and fireless indoors. Merry still sleeps upstairs, the latest victim to The Cold. And I have returned to work, which is varied and interesting. Today, it's research on Indian pangolins and Bengali poets, including Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Asian person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. At the end of this brief post, I (and the Poetry Foundation) gift you with a wonderful poem-note penned by Tagore to you, the reader, a hundred years hence.
The sun is playing games this morning--and we vitamin-D starved folk are a rapt audience, eagerly craving the warmth of its capricious rays. It peeks out again and suddenly I hear the happy shrieks of the neighbor's wee boys across the street, where they are running across the sodden lawn. I can see their coats flash in the lower branches of the tall spruce and then behind the waxy leaves of the giant rhododendron. Their visiting Grandma wanders about, collecting poop that the family's elderly, kind golden lab has been depositing here and there.
I remember mornings like these, when the most pressing matter in the day was whether or not nap time would be observed; what picture books we would read together; which show we'd watch after nap (Kipper or The Wiggles--please, let it be Kipper!), and who wanted peanut butter with their apple slices. I am bettered by a thousand such gentle mornings!
And the glory from the melting snow and the sun--so temporal as well, yet so beautiful--I'm better for taking it in while I stood on the porch, rubbing mud from Charley with a big blue towel. I have been bedazzled by the glorious Japanese maple, glittering with sunlit water droplets--and I will never be the same.
What changed you this morning? What was your moment of beauty that, as Tagore writes in his poem (below) will send its "glad voice across a hundred years?"
*
At the beginning of "The Gardener 85," Tagore asks,
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?He tells us he cannot send us "one single flower from this wealth of the spring" or a "streak of gold" from the clouds. Then he admonishes us to fling open our own doors and take in all the beauty waiting for us in our own time and space, in our own sacred moment.
Here is the second stanza of that lovely poem (from The Poetry Foundation):
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
Again, you really should read the poem in its entirety by visiting The Poetry Foundation.
Who are you, reader, reading my post so far away?
I cannot send you one single drop of snow melted by the morning sun,
one single velvet crocus petal.
Open your doors and look abroad!
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