Your Daily Miracle: Grubby Pennies

"Annie Dillard!" I mutter through my teeth as I fish around in a muddy puddle to retrieve yet another random penny.  I hold that Pulitzer Prize-winning American author personally responsible for my filthy pockets and dirty fingertips over the last twenty years.

Yet there are worse things than dirty pockets.  In her essay, Seeing (included in the her brilliant book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), Dillard describes how as a child she delighted in hiding pennies to be found by lucky passersby.  She'd squirrel a precious coin away at the bottom of a tree, then scrawl arrows all over the sidewalk accompanied by messages like "Money Right This Way!"  The world's gifts--nature's revelations--are like those pennies, she tells us.  They are free to those who will just take the time to cultivate seeing.

Well, come on, who doesn't want to cultivate seeing?  I want, like Beatrix, to have the childlike moxie to scoop up a furry bee and study it as it crawls on my finger.  I want to look for hours for frog eggs in the creek or like Dillard, see ephemeral lights in a tree and never be the same again.  But as adults, we lose our knack.  There are schedules to keep.  Responsibility hangs on my ankle like a whiny kid.  I can't kick it off and it sure makes it hard to gamble lightheartedly through a flowered meadow.


I don't know about you, but I see a whole bunch of stray pennies--under the grocery cart's wheels in a littered parking lot, on bathroom floors, lodged in sidewalk cracks.  And every time I see one, I berate myself for my utter lack of enthusiasm: "Am I so poor in my soul that I will not stoop to pick up this penny?  Have I stopped embracing wonder?"

So I gingerly pick up the nasty piece of change and pocket it, all the time half-cursing Annie Dillard under my breath.  But maybe there's wisdom here? Maybe experiencing wonder is sometimes less about happenstance and more about choice--the choice to see.  Do I really want to be surprised by wonder?  Well then, I need to turn off my phone, kneel down, and learn how to be in the present moment, even if that's a bit uncomfortable.  Annie Dillard writes:

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.

Annie Dillard also writes:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Man, that just puts me on a guilt trip, and I am SURE that Dillard did not mean for any of her readers to feel a pang of shame every time they suck up a penny with the vacuum cleaner.  I should know better--reducing a metaphor to literal understanding strips it of its magic and makes it hollow, sentimental, and legalistic.

The point is, then, to keep seeing, to remain open to wonder, even when it's grubby.  Take the minutes I recently spent lying down in the grass under the flowering cherry tree.  I smelled dog poop.  My knees got wet.   I produced nothing of consequence.  But my spirit got soaked in wonder.  I was still long enough to even notice the tiny spider on the daffodil petal.  See it?  I'm not quite up to Annie Dillard's gift at observing and entering in, but I rolled around on my back a bit alongside the dog.  That has to count for something.

Over the years, I've adopted Dillard's metaphor and changed it just slightly.  Stray pennies scooped into my palm indeed signify Unexpected Gifts.   But just like the coppery coins that have, over their wayward lifetimes, gathered rust and dirt and the stuff of this world, my pennies say to me: Keep Hoping!  No matter what news hits you today, no matter how small your life suddenly feels, no matter what evil is shaking this planet, the world yields goodness.  Look at this small gift in your palm.  Look at the riches available to you if you are willing to stoop down and claim them, grimy and common though they may be!