Carol McClain

Find Beauty. It Hides in Plain Sight

by: Carol McClain @CAROL_MCCLAIN

Let’s face it. With Covid-19, our world has grown small. We’re tempted to despair as family members fall prey to the virus, and friends need to be socially distant.

Our lives are, according to Annie Dillard (and I have many a student who will groan as they hear me return to my old friend A Pilgrim on Tinker Creek) “… a a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.”

Who are we? What is our purpose?

No one gets out of life unscarred, so what do we do?

We need to open our eyes and see the wonders of this world.

She also says, “If the landscape reveals one certainly, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”

I’d challenge you to take this time of isolation and be in awe of God’s extravagant gesture.

1. A rainbow when there was no rain. I was sick with bronchitis and woke early with a coughing fit. My husband called me to the porch. Off in the west, a gorgeous double rainbow bannered the horizon.
2. Wisteria that gave no hint of bloom exploded on our hillside. Gorgeous purple blossoms draped over trees and perfumed the air with its lilac-like scent.
3. The first hummingbird fluttered to our rosebushes. Somehow, every April, they find their way from their winter home to dance at our feeders. To fight each other. To hover over my head when their nectar is low.
4. Lightening blazes behind the Cumberland Mountains, outlining them in the dark of night.
5. The air smells ionized with the coming rain.
6. Mayapples bloom with intricate flowers hidden beneath broad leaves.
7. Brown jugs blossom under leaf litter. All you have to do is know where to look, and there they are.
8. Birds chatter. Each call distinct and different. They call. Others respond. We’re serenaded.
9. Bees buzz over crab apple blossoms, humming like chain saws, busy collecting pollen which will turn into the honey I drizzle in the tea made from my garden’s peppermint.
10. Worms as thick as my finger and as long as my hand fertilize the fragrant soil and create for me a glorious garden.

Dillard also says: “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusion on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.