LOOK UP!
From my daughter, Evangeline JohnsonThere is so much ‘light’ to be lived and so much ‘life’ to be lived under the grayest of skies and bluest of skies! Yes!
The skies of our brain are made up of 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day! Can you imagine seeing 70,000 stars twinkling and pulsing with life through an inky black sky? It would pulse our breath into sheer wonder and glory! That’s how I feel!
My stars are my thoughts! I must choose them! I don’t let the inky black displace the light of 70,000 twinkling light choices even though the dark night says it’s always going to be there in the background!
No! It’s the very war cry against the inky black that has my soul breathing the words of Light Himself: “Shine! Shine! Shine like stars in the universe! See! I have set you as a light to shine!”
And how? Ho do I do that?
In the epic revelation that ‘shining’ begins in “my own sky,” my own mind! Will I light my own backdrop to see the light, goodness, glory, and beauty of the everyday?
Will I realize that the mystical music of living each day is doing the little things that need doing with a smile? The things that no one gives a nod to play the music of life more beautifully than Beethoven’s greatest symphony!
Why should we live for those fleeting high moments when we can have the thrill of enjoying a million mundane everyday moments of time that make one love life?
These moments, these notes, each one supporting the best music ever played! To live nother note is thrilling!
Imagine sneering at the sound of a new heartbeat? Impossible! That sound brings triumphant celebrations, yet what does it do? A job that is day in and day out, year in and year out, never changing. When it begins, we give parties and when it stops, we cry!
Then why should we sneer at the day in and day out heartbeats of our season? Why should we cry over the mundane rituals that accompany our season?
When we are changing diapers and they say they are “changing the world,” you beam your smile wider! While they are standing to receive accolades and you are falling on your knees from a stray Lego, keep smiling!
Yes! Feed the children, get them to bed, and wake up and do it again. And what for?
Because it is beautiful!
Because this is what makes life! Our everyday moments. The ritual of the everyday! The business of breathing, bathing, work, and the hours people call mundane to live, are in fact our treasure!
The secret to loving life is not in pursuit of life but of loving every moment in the ritual of the everyday!
If the joyful heartbeat of daily living dies in your whining, you will live for yourself and lose your soul trying to find a purpose for life.
NOTHING is as dead as not realizing your season and the ritual of it! To escape the mundane is to escape the incredibly beautiful whole of life! The sheer goodness of having a work before us that is enduring, made up of scars and healing, laughter after pain, dancing after mourning! It is beautiful, utterly beautiful. To look for anything outside of that is to look for something that doesn’t exist!
It is a fast-paced, fleeting fame, and burnout world that offers you false highs, empty escapes, and thousands of new toys to try to make you happy.
But you, yes, you have the market on life! Your mind can choose its skies where the insignificant and daily duties are quite literally the bulbs of blazing life and awe!
Look up, my friend! Look up! There are 70,000 twinkling stars for the choosing!
EVANGELINE JOHNSON
Picture: Evangeline still healing from her broken shoulder.
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