When the big picture keeps getting darker, it helps to zoom in.
...As Ash Wednesday approaches, I find myself thinking again and again of that ordinary miracle, that commonplace resurrection, that everlasting antidote to the temporary perfidy of a red-faced man hollering out his hour on the national stage. For Lent this year, I would like to give up the news — I would like to give up the president himself for Lent this year — but life in a democracy does not afford such luxuries.
Instead of giving up something for Lent, I’m planning to make a heartfelt offering. In times like these, it makes more sense to seek out daily causes for praise than daily reminders of lack. So here is my resolution: to find as many ordinary miracles as a waterlogged winter can put forth, as many resurrections as an eerily early springtime will allow. Tiny beautiful things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world, and I am going to keep looking every single day until I find one. Margaret Renkl
Instead of giving up something for Lent, I’m planning to make a heartfelt offering. In times like these, it makes more sense to seek out daily causes for praise than daily reminders of lack. So here is my resolution: to find as many ordinary miracles as a waterlogged winter can put forth, as many resurrections as an eerily early springtime will allow. Tiny beautiful things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world, and I am going to keep looking every single day until I find one. Margaret Renkl
The beautiful thing in the darkness of my life is the daffodils rising with fortitude from the swamp of my front yard. Daffodils are resilient perennials; like us, they rise up over and over again, after a long winter underground, despite the frost and floods of a typical Tennessee spring. They still grow in the empty lots where homes used to be; they'll outlast us, most likely. The oldest living organism in the world is a bristlecone pine. Our lives are just a blip on the radar of time; that pine existed six thousand years before the common era. I'm grateful that life will continue when I'm gone. Eight years is the blink of an eye, in the scope of the things. We will survive this. At least that's what the daffodils seem to be saying, even though the weather is dark and stormy right now.
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