I love fall. I love the brilliant reds and oranges of the maple trees and the service berry trees. When we planted a maple at our old house, I chose the one with the brightest red leaves I could find. They looked unreal to me, and were a great delight. This weekend I looked up and realized that in the midst of my busyness, the most of the orange and red leaves were gone, fallen to the ground and gathered in bags or mulched into lawns.
I had been half lamenting the loss of the brilliance of the peak of fall, partly grieving the slide into the empty limbs of winter. But in focusing on the loss of that peak, I missed the beauty still present.
I was on a run (a shuffle really, since I hadn't exercised but once this week because of sickness in our house), and all of a sudden I saw yellow, bright against the gray sky and matching a yellow house nearby. I realized there is beauty in yellow and brown leaves. It was a reminder to be look for God's graces in the quotidian, the every day.
The author Kathleen Norris has helped me see the beauty in the everyday. This morning I reached for her book The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work', which I taught a few years ago in a first year seminar. Norris celebrates that the daily tasks we have to do--laundry, cleaning the kitchen, getting ready for the day--can draw us closer to God and to one another. She writes: "we want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely everyday places--out of Galilee, as it were--and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet" (12).
One of my prayers for today is that I would have eyes to see the blessings in front of me, like the Gingko tree out my window, with leaves scattered around its base and maybe half still hanging on to its limbs. Another is that in my quotidian acts--even in a season of tiredness and sickness--I would bring God's kindness to others.
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