Raft is a series of literary reflections accompanied by guided meditations for relationship loss.
I'm going to read and reflect on a poem by Wysława Zimborska,
The Polish poet,
Called Miracle Fair.
You can find a corresponding guided meditation inspired by this poem here on Insight Timer.
The commonplace miracle,
That so many common miracles take place.
The usual miracle,
Invisible dogs barking in the dead of night.
One of many miracles,
A small and airy cloud is able to upstage the massive moon.
Several miracles in one,
An alder is reflected in the water and is reversed from left to right and grows from crown to root and never hits bottom,
Though the water isn't deep.
A run-of-the-mill miracle,
Winds mild to moderate,
Turning gusty in storms.
A miracle in the first place,
Cows will be cows.
Next but not least,
Just this cherry orchard from just this cherry pit.
A miracle minus top hat and tails,
Fluttering white doves.
A miracle,
What else can you call it?
The sun rose today at 3 14 a.
M.
And will set tonight at one past eight.
A miracle that's lost on us.
The hand actually has fewer than six fingers,
But it's still got more than four.
A miracle,
Just take a look around,
The inescapable earth.
An extra miracle,
Extra and ordinary,
The unthinkable can be thought.
Many of us think of miracles as either supernatural religious phenomena or as something both extremely good and unlikely happening at the same time.
But what if we broadened our understanding of what miracles are?
As Vyshlava Dzhemborska does in this poem,
The oxymoron in the first lines,
The commonplace miracle that so many common miracles take place,
Invokes this broadening of our understanding or of our way of seeing and experiencing the world.
There's this wonderful sentence by the poet Mary Ruffle,
She says,
To live is so startling,
It leaves but little room for other occupations.
Good poetry reminds us of this,
Of how startling,
How stunning it is simply to be alive,
It is simply to be alive,
That we get to be here at all in these bodies.
I'm reminded of a little poem,
Almost a prayer by G.
K.
Chesterton,
Written in the same spirit as Ruffle and of this poem by Dzhemborska,
It's called Evening.
Here dies another day,
During which I have had eyes,
Ears,
Hands,
And the great world round me,
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed to?
Chesterton asks,
Why am I allowed to,
Meaning two days,
When one day in and of itself is so marvelously startling,
So miraculous.
In the same vein Dzhemborska writes,
A miracle that's lost on us,
The hand actually has fewer than six fingers,
But still it's got more than four.
When we are suffering from the loss of a relationship,
It's very easy to get trapped inside our head.
Unwelcome thoughts can flood our minds,
And when this happens,
One thing you might do is look a little more carefully at the things around you and attempt to find some gratitude in their existence,
To see something unlikely and miraculous in their presence.
An old neighborhood tree,
For instance,
Or the construction of a comfortable chair,
The way a tea bag is neatly packaged,
The sound of a bird singing,
Hot water from a shower,
The way your body breathes without asking it to,
The way the evening light falls through a window to make the floorboards luminous.
