inspiration

“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no-one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. If landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down through aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigour…the whole world sparks and flames..’ Annie Dillard ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’

I read this again for the umpteenth time last week and wondered how it was that I could discipline myself to notice? To develop the habit of being there to the world and noticing the grace that is present in each day. Hence the blog and the title.

To record the moments of each day when the mockingbird takes the leap.

It might be the angle of the fall of wind blown rain, a good conversation over fine coffee, a video on youtube, a train running on time, a lover’s touch, the way sunlight is filtered through winter trees….whatever it is that represents a moment worth noting.

Just a sentence or two as a witness to the moment I was present and aware.

And to enter this period of awareness with friends, in a kind of temporary community. People watching and waiting for something wonderful, even as we wait during Advent for the appearance of the Christ Child.

So that in the midst of the pimping of the season we are attentive to his coming.