The View from Here
It’s so often something tiny, undramatic...
It’s so often something tiny, undramatic. I was sitting in my car the other evening waiting to collect my granddaughter from a dance session and taking a few minutes to write my daily entry into my current copy of Weather Report. I enjoy being out and about with my journal, the opportunity for fresh external noticings - to my right, the yellow gorse colonising a patch of unused ground; to my left, a rusted green skip filled to almost toppling with what looked like boxes and cardboard waste.
I lifted my head and my pen from the page to consider what I would enter as my ‘beautiful thing’ from the day. Right then a tiny insect landed on my car windscreen. There it was, my beautiful thing - four legs so slender, wings like gauze. Everything about it delicate, perfect, enough. When I raised my head and pen again it had gone. A single moment; tiny, undramatic but all the more beautiful for that.
I have a quote from writer
1 on the opening page of another notebook I use, which is something of a compass point for me:“Start with the wonder, or we won’t have the heart for the journey”.
This quote captures for me the importance of being attentive, for each of us to decide on what is beautiful, what gives us pause for a moment of wonder, in the ordinary of our days. Experiencing wonder, beauty, is a way of bolstering us when we might indeed falter in the face of the pummelling we get constantly in the ‘news from everywhere’.
It seems auspicious to me that I came to Day 912 of my most recent copy of Weather Report on February 28th and I begin again in a fresh copy, with the date of the 29th February as Day 1, this special extra ‘leap’ day.
Then I did what I always do before I start to write my entries on the inside of a fresh copy, I colour all the outer edges, mark them with crayons or markers. Why? So that the book is no longer pristine and is already marked. It’s so much less intimidating then to mark it with my scribbles on the inside . Plus, I like to personalise it.
I hope there is at least one thing you found beautiful, that filled you with wonder, that made your heart leap today?
I will be hosting my next monthly early morning writing sessions, The Bag of Stars, the week beginning Monday, 11th through to Friday, 15th March, at 7am GMT, on Zoom. The title, ‘The Bag of Stars’, comes from the final line of Ursula K. Le Guin's wonderful essay / book, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction;:
'Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.'
If you would like to join me just get in touch.
This quote may have emerged from a Zoom meeting / conversation, or I may have read it in Dougald’s book, which I cannot recommend highly enough, At Work in the Ruins.
Yes, there are 91 days of writing in this ‘90-day’ journal - an extra day in each copy, a bit like the extra day in February this year.
It was good to ‘meet’ you on Sam’s call today and to learn of our shared interest in beauty, those small things that can shift the needle on the day. It’s interesting how we have ‘nice’ insects (butterflies, bees, dragonflies and so on) that we take notice of and all too frequently dismiss the rest; they are all beautiful in their own way and have a role to play (I’m not sure deer tick nymphs will ever win my affection though).
We are enjoying another unseasonably warm spring day in Wisconsin. On a park walk, Henrietta and I passed a your mother pushing a two-tiered pram. I spoke with the toddler and heard a squeak from the babe hidden under a cover. The mother was pretty with long dark hair -- soft spoken with a warm smile.
I found this beautiful.