Some days, I sit and watch, listen, and sense the wonders of the world around me. Within these wonders, things and people invite me to remember things embedded within nature and in my life. The extraordinary emerges from the ordinary. Often, I overlook what and who is important in my life, who give and gave me unconditional support.
Natasha Trethewey shared this wonderful poem about the unobserved industry that goes on around me. It is not just busy industry. I focus on a particular calling in life. I find my voice in the work. For humans, there is a multiplicity in the work and the way it shapes life. Similar to the woodpecker, it seems I look for the gifts I overlook. There is more embedded in life than just hanging laundry and other obvious tasks I undertake. When I attend and am present, the barely perceptible–the liminal– is visible, heard, and fully sensed.
All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,
his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.
She is here, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line–each one
a thin white screen between between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be
looking for something else–not simply
the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 