How to build a new world
“Ask yourself how you can transform this very moment into something radiant and radical and spectacular.”—Elizabeth Gilbert
I often share “You are never gonna believe this” stories here on the blog. And while an eerily spectacular tale recently dropped into my inbox (it involved a completely empty cabinet that suddenly filled with necessary medical supplies), I’ve been thinking more about the gazillion little miracles I walk by every day.
For the past week, I’ve been hosting some of the folks I met in South Africa. Lucien and Theolene are currently attending I.Y.O.U. (International Youth of Unity) at Unity Village, but last week, we did a lot of things that I’ve been known to take for granted—going to a movie theater (neither had ever been), for example, or eating foods from other countries. We even stopped by the local “Make Good Trouble” protest in honor of John Lewis.
They loved EVERYTHING! They were excited by EVERYTHING! They even requested their picture taken with a big yellow school bus.
Maybe more important than making an impact, I should make sure I myself am impacted, that I myself notice and get excited by the countless treasures that exist in every moment.
Sure, things can look scary from one viewpoint, but it’s a mistake to tether myself to that position only, to disregard all the everyday lusciousness, like the hibiscus showing off in my front yard right now or the curly-haired three-year-old who danced her way up to the stage at yesterday’s quilt auction.
Like so many people, I’ve been deeply inspired by Andrea Gibson, the poet who passed last week from ovarian cancer. She said in one of her poems, “Dying is the opposite of leaving” and that, after death, she’d be “more here than ever before.” That certainly rings true-her poems are everywhere now.
She knew to fall in love with tiny things (“every falling leaf is a tiny kite with a string too small to see”) and, after her cancer diagnosis, every single experience became radiant and filled with light.
As Byron Katie once explained to Elizabeth Gilbert (I just read about this in her weekly “Letters from Love”), all she saw when she looked at her was pouring beams of light. Liz pointed out that Katie also saw those same beams of light emanating from the ketchup bottles.
But you get the idea. We see what we decide to see. We create our world with our attention.
So, yes, I will continue to celebrate big, juicy, “impossible” miracles. But I will also celebrate the small and seemingly insignificant. In other words, I intend to fall in love with everything I see.
#222 Forever!
Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World)