Tiny Miracles

I have never believed in a god in the traditional sense, and my opinions of organized religion could be defined as downright antagonistic.

I have wanted to believe before. My dad died when I was fifteen. I wanted so badly to believe in a god. I wanted a higher power to alternately rail against and to find comfort in, but you can’t talk yourself into belief of something intangible.

There have been less than a handful of times in my life, sitting under a tree, with my back against the sun warmed bark, feeling the texture through my shirt, watching the branches dance in the wind above me, or sitting in the chilly nightime sand of a summer beach, letting the individual grains slip through my fingers, listening to the perpetual crash of the waves, watching the impossibly enormous moon on the horizon, when I have felt an enormous bubble of joy and peace rise within me, and thought, “If there is something of the spiritual divine in this world, this must be it.”

I have been attempting, as Cheryl Strayed says, “to place myself in the way of beauty” ever since. I am constantly reminding myself to practice finding the sacred in the mundane.

Again, Cheryl Strayed says it well:

“What if you allowed your God to existing the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the magic in that?”

If we are constantly expecting immense cosmic miracles, we will always feel betrayed. We will be blinded to the many smaller miracles surrounding us every day that could inspire gratitude and peace.