Bless This Ordinary Day

-

 Friends! It's been a while, but I've gotten back to the blog! Here's a writing I did yesterday, inspired by the poem "Normal Day" by Mary Jean Irion.



Bless this ordinary day…

Bless the coffee, which is such an ordinary part of so many of our lives, yet has travelled great distances to cheer our cup.

Bless the high lands and steep mountainsides where the beans grow.

Bless Tanzania, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Sumatra, Guatemala.

Bless the workers who pick and who roast.

Bless Fair Trade organizations who ensure these workers are paid fairly for all their labors.

Bless the shelf stockers, organizing and reorganizing the shelves so we can easily find our coffee, our cereals, our daily bread.

Then bless the water.

Bless the first sips of the morning, the ones that rehydrate your parched body.

Bless the water, so easily accessible to us, that flows from our faucets, our showerheads, our spigots.

And bless the wells and the rain barrels.

Bless all those around the world for whom getting clean water is much more of a chore.

Bless our white oval tabletop, surrounded by four wooden chairs.

Bless this table which invites us to sit and linger for a while, which coaxes us to not be in such a rush.

Even bless the crumbs and the dried pasta on the floor, remnants of last night’s dinner.

Bless the mess – it too is evidence that we’re alive.

Bless the tomate, y cebolla, y aguacate

Which when you say it in Spanish, just somehow makes the meal taste that much better.

Bless tortilla chips and the crunch.

Bless the bright blue sky and the puffy white clouds.

God bless the dandelions - even and especially when your neighbor nonchalantly asks if you still have your lawn service.

Bless the pillows, and the blackout curtains, and your good sense to take that nap.

Bless the teachers, the school bus drivers, and their uncanny ability to not snap amidst the rowdy schoolchildren.

God bless Buddy Benches and Little Free Libraries.

Bless and bless and bless… until we lose sight of just what it was that we wanted to curse about.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Good News

-
“They don’t publish the good news. The good news is published by us. We have a special edition every moment, And we need you to read it.” Excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, “The Good News” You should really look up this poem and read it… it’s really great. Especially for these times we’re living in. I don’t know about you, but with all that’s going on in the world, in our country, in our communities… it seems like the good news is getting harder and harder to find.  I like to stay informed, yet when the morning paper comes and it hits the kitchen table, everything in that front section seems to scream BAD NEWS!!   It’s not exactly a great way to start the day.   Covid-19, killer hornets, racially fueled violence, warnings that if we don’t do something soon, the Earth’s temperature will get so hot that it will be inhabitable… probably in my lifetime, and certainly in my kids’. Yes of course, it’s a journalist’s duty to repo...
Read more

"Onward we go, faithfully into the dark..."

-
So I was going to write an “end-of-2020” blog. But I didn’t want it to be full of doom and gloom, as not everything was bad! Even in the worst of times, I believe we can still find some things to be thankful for.   Anne Frank once wrote, “ I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains. ”   If she could write that in the midst of the Holocaust, I think I can certainly find some beauty that remains in these times too. Yet I also didn’t want to write something that might come off sounding overly optimistic, as we are not out of the woods yet. Not by any measure. We’ve got many dense forests ahead of us to navigate through. For all the signs of hope, for the signaling of a transfer of power… it always seemed like it was “one step forward, two steps back.”   There was no way 2020 could be wrapped up neatly with a bow.   If 2020 taught us anything, maybe one of those things was not to be so certain of certainty.   “Hold things loosely,” “...
Read more

Barbie Girl, In a Barbie World?

-
Do you remember the late 90s song, “Barbie Girl?”   You know, the one with the annoyingly catchy, can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head refrain, “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world, life in plastic, it’s fantastic.”   I was a senior in high school when that song came out, and while I remember the refrain, I don’t think I paid a whole lot of attention to the rest of the lyrics.   It was just a “catchy song.” So why have I been thinking about this song lately, you may ask?!   Well, I’ve been reading an amazing book that deals with the stress we experience specifically as women. It’s entitled, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.  Twin sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski combine their brilliantly scientific minds to take on stress and big topics like - how in the world are women supposed to live a joyful and fulfilled life in the midst of a sexist world?!    In a world that is constantly telling women we are too fat, ...
Read more