Curations: Field Guide

It feels like we are barreling. That's what my wife calls it, when our days and weeks start to fill up, and we are just going from one thing to the next.

With school starting back, and after-school activities and sports resuming, not to mention the frantic pace of our lives anyways, we could use the reminder to pause and remember to "look for the good parts."

Tony Hoagland's "Field Guide" (below) does just that - it points us to and celebrates the commonplace, ordinary moments of life, which are actually quite extraordinary and transcendent - maybe even miraculous - but because they are commonplace and ordinary, we often overlook them. Or we look right at them without truly seeing them for what they are.

And if we truly believe that God is incarnational - as much as part of this world as we human beings are - that there is "one God...of all, who is above all and through all and in all" (Ephesians 4:6), then we are up to our necks in miracles every moment of every day.

- GJD

"Field Guide" by Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake, up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly, like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested. That’s all.

I mention this in the same way that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books, so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.