Small Things

I have my own pet definition of what a “saint” is. They are someone who sees beauty where most don’t. They are someone who sees value where most don’t. They are someone who looks through the veil of culture and society and sees what is truly there, not what is represented.

A saint like my mother.

I truly mean that. One of my friends long ago quipped that my mother was “saint-like” and it is true. For she truly saw through the vanity and falsity of our existence, our upbringings - saw through it and found friendship and sanctity with small things. The fresh wind blowing through her hair. An afternoon spent feeding by hand some baby goats. An hour drinking tea and being at ease looking at her hummingbirds drinking honey-water from the tree feeder. My mother didn’t need the big stuff, the adornments, the false prophets and their shiny gifts, the idolatry of “big”.

I wrote previously about small things. I’m writing again after doing lots of video editing recently and then reflecting on the “small things” of this process. The devil is in the details, don’t they say?

True, truth full, nail through the wrist, naked art is about the small things, the things we miss but which are clues to our world and place in it. The way a spider hangs from a thread. How a baby reaches for her toys, above her head. The things we hear when we stop listening to everything else. The small things.

They are clues alive and “big”, if we just take time to let them be noticed and fix our souls so they align with their true force. We live in a world that measures “up” but life has no measuring stick, it won’t be quantified and compared. Everything is a special way, is unique and incomparable.

I think of all the quarks, photons, electron thriving and thronging inside you. Why don’t we notice this? I think we are hypnotized by an evil sorcerer, enchanted by force, power, strength that is but appearance and not truly force, power, strength. The microbes know the truth and the viruses know who rules the world.

“The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, disheveled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty. Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.” ― Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone

I think all of us are due some time to just relax in the smallness of life, to value that which has not been assigned value. To be saints again, to be holy and in touch with our truth again.

Let’s notice the dust, dead skin cells and lint that scatters as you shake your valuable shirt. It is there all the same. It is the only part of the shirt that is really you.

Take some time to not be “in time”. Just enjoy the day without the tick-tock. Live a minute, 6 hours just there, being, here and now. Embrace your smallness and insignificance and in that way, you’ll start to see the beauty of that which is small and insignificant.

When was the last time you listened to the sound of your holy breathing?

Let’s learn to be at home with the small things. The smallest of pleasures. Chuck the dreams of this and that - the dream you really need for this year or any year, is right in front of you. It’s small, you just go to see it.

I hope we all suffer from nearsightedness this year.

Entropy

Nothing endures, all fades
Photographs yellow, stars burst
Even my lovers pearly whites
Seem to be vulnerable to cavities.

Only those minute bacteria,
those earth turner
That hold the world up on their shoulders
Seem to have learned to be.

They die over and over, thus live forever.
They have learned that the laws of our universe
Do not apply to the insignificant.