Monday Mimisms ~ Ordinary Secrets

I've been thinking a lot about thankfulness lately. If you can drown out the screaming sales tags, endless commercials and constant pleas for help from a trillion questionable charities that seem to come out of the woodwork this time of year, well, then you might have time to think about thankfulness.

Last night, after cleaning and fru-fruing (that means making nice in the house ie: flowers and candles) for today's post-Thanksgiving-pre-Christmas-decoration party, I stood at the sink looking out my kitchen window, staring at an ordinary sunset through ordinary trees on any ordinary Saturday night. And I remembered, for a second, how good it is, how life-affirming....to stop and look through ordinary windows at masterpieces in the sky.  I stopped rearranging and took a good long look. No inside ambiance conjured up by a fru-fruing woman can hold a candle to what I saw through that window.
I took a moment to be thankful for unexpected glimpses of heaven into ordinary days.

Take this for example. A small spray of daisies on my table. If I look closer I can see the presence of creation. The miracle of nature. The strength of extraordinary petals on an ordinary table. But I have to stop and look.

I don't mind if the lighting is all wrong. Or even accidentally all right. The best things seem to always come to me by accident. So, to me, it looks just right.
It's the same with people.
You have to take the shadow with the light for what it is.

And sometimes looking at the underside of a thing....

reveals much more than the presentable side ever did. It's the same with people.

If you want to know who they are, all you have to do is find out from whence they gather their strength. Unseen stems make all types of flowers - some beautiful - and some still in beauty school.

For weeks I've stopped dead in my tracks at the thought of one thing - spring.  The weather has been unseasonably warm here. I feel a light breeze, turn around thinking spring has come, when it's only November. But something about this seasonal premonition makes me bubble up and laugh. Out loud. In the first trimester of winter. Like a happy happy secret. In my car. On the way to my ordinary mailbox in my ordinary driveway on any ordinary day. Suddenly, there is spring.

Perhaps that's why I bought a bouquet of daisies for my table.

Sometimes it's shadow and sometimes it's light.

All of it is beautiful.

Even as far-reaching and wondrous as my kitchen sunset was, I only cared for the moment that it was beautiful. And that was enough. Earth science and solar systems and all the scientific explanations in the world didn't matter. So I declare, today on the cusp of winter's bite, that I will stop trying to find ways of duplicating the obvious, when all I have to do is look through a pane of glass at eons of creation or find an eternity's worth of gratitude on my kitchen table. Spring wants to tell me something.

And something tells me....it won't be an ordinary spring.