Finding the Extra in Extraordinary

The Ultimate 007 Adventure

Noticing. It is never presented as fun. Usually as more of a half-preachy, half-guilt-trippy directive.

This is definitely true for me– half-scolding our kids on Autumn trips upstate to look up from their devices and NOTICE THE LEAVES, that mother nature has generously set ablaze for our enjoyment, again!

Be grateful. Open your eyes. Look around you.

I feel this way towards myself too. Scolding myself to appreciate beauty as I pass it by going a hundred miles an hour in my mind.

I forget that noticing is actually enormously fun. An adventure. A child-like romp in the sandbox of memory and imagination.

One of my favorite poets, Palestinian-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye captures the spirit of this sentiment beautifully.

She is talking about where poems hide.

But I think she could equally be talking about the extraordinary.

I have copied two segments from her poem, “Valentine for Ernest Mann”, which she reads with commentary and a quite fabulous story, if you follow this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBH6GNHbp1Y

Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them…

 

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us

we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock

in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.

And let me know.

The extraordinary hides out.

It is easy to find it in a voluptuous hydrangea bloom or a puppy’s first snow.

The extra is right there on the surface. It still requires time to acknowledge. But there’s no fundamental confusion about where to look.

There is appreciation but no adventure or grand surprise.

But to be an undercover explorer on a mission…

To find the extra in the margins of our everyday … in that image that keeps cascading through our mind or the dream segment that keep asking to be paid attention to – to reveal the diamond in the clump of coal.

Now that’s something.

What we do with it is individual.

To braid the strands of extra into a poem or essay or journal entry– well, it allows us, as poet Anais Nin says, to taste life twice.

Obviously, I love writing. But this extra could be beautifully translated into a song or piece of art or dance or talk about with someone dear.

The adventure and finding and noticing is incredible but there is something about the honoring of the extra in extraordinary that feels deeply nourishing.

It grounds us and sends us soaring.

Connects and roots us and sets us free. Lets us know we are a part of something much more grand and beautiful.