An avalanche of astonishment

“The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic disenchantment that seems to surround everything these days.”—Nick Cave

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the reason the experiments in E-Squared worked so beautifully is because well, they can’t NOT work.

Gifts, winks, nods from the beneficent universe show up every single day. What the E-Squared experiments did was encourage readers to pay attention. The 48-hour experiments tricked us into temporarily shifting our focus from “oh-no” to “wow.”

Luis Alberto Urrea, the prolific Mexican-American writer and poet, was here in Lawrence this week. I loved him and his wife, Cinderella (yes, that’s her real name), SO MUCH.

A story he told about the medicine women he met while researching his amazing novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, brought everything into focus for me.

Every day, the shamans told him, is your birthday. Yes, you typically celebrate it once a year. However, all day, every day you’re being sent gifts.

We’re mostly blind to this avalanche of astonishment because we’re busy wanting something else—say, more followers, a skinnier body, a higher-paying job.

The world, the medicine women pointed out, never stops talking to us, never stops sending messages. We don’t always get them because, well, we’ve built a lot of walls.

The gifts aren’t always huge—maybe a ladybug or making authentic eye contact with a stranger or the majestic sky ballet of a pair of hawks overhead.

But whether you’re paying attention or not, the gifts are always there. As Urrea said, “We live in paradise and we forgot.”

Yes, I still take umbrage at things happening out there in the world. And you better believe I’m heading to a–let’s just call it a “No Kings” party– later today. But in the meantime, I plan to celebrate today’s birthday, to bring back love notes about my endless gifts.

#222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 22 books including E-Squared, Thank & Grow Rich , The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World)and her latest, The Ego’s Playbook.