On Noticing Small Things

On noticing small things: If you haven't done this lately, do it.  The world is an astonishment, a golden coin always jingling in your pocket: whenever you want you can take it out and marvel at its richness.

And you are a part of it.  You are of the same value. There is the elaborate beadwork of your own skin.  There is the perfect array of your eyelashes (bat your eyes, feel them).  There are the textures of the things your eyes fall on, some of them as fine as your own skin, even finer, and some as broad as the hull of a ship. There are tiny things that move and crawl in our gutters, and the way water washes in a gutter, sometimes in long straws, and there is the rather brilliant design of the piece of furniture you might be sitting on, to say nothing of grass and sand, that never complain when we sit there, what resilience, what beauty, what fineness. When was the last time you looked at a cloud, a shadow, the fold in your elbow, the perfect roundness of a dinner plate, a clever, clever cardboard box, the shapes of words themselves?  Them selves. Oh it's delicious, it's funny, it's charming!  And there is the way rust grows and even garbage lies, waiting to become something else.  And sounds.  Not just one, most of them come in layers.  And your ear can hear.  Have you listened?  Have you tried to separate the sounds?  Take your hand and feel whatever is near you.  Lick your lips and notice the taste.  Close your eyes and watch color turn down, as though it had volume, as though it were also a sound.

Open your eyes.  Smell the air.  What is it?

Extraordinary.  Take time.  Count the riches.  Brush the earth off as happily as you would the roughest diamond.

--MD


Photo credit: Bruce Barone