So. This Is What It's All About

Here's me, being so geeky that I'm watching a show on PBS about the making of Prairie Home Companion. Having a hot flash.

I'm tired. I'm having a hard time getting to sleep at night. Oh, I fall asleep but then I wake up, generally with a hot flash or maybe with my hips hurting or my hand going numb. Something. Some thing which is a result of the age I've attained or else some way I've wracked my body in the course of my years. And then I go back to sleep but I wake up a few minutes later and after a few cycles of this, I just get up for awhile and go out to the kitchen and read and eat things I shouldn't but I don't feel guilty about that. Not like I'm eating a cake or a pot roast or anything.
Just something soothing, like maybe cereal and it's so quiet at that time of night with the dogs asleep and maybe snorffling a little as they dream and the refrigerator humming and then stopping, and the sounds of the night crickets and frogs outside thrumming through the walls.
And eventually, my body is soothed and so is my mind and I go back to bed and fall asleep beside my sleeping husband.

I am at the age where I like being soothed, which is why I guess I like Garrison Keillor so much. I love it when he does the It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon part and half the time I don't even follow the story. I just listen to his voice as he talks, that way of speaking he has which people make fun of but which I can't get enough of. He's probably one of the whitest white men on the planet but I don't care about that, either. He doesn't pretend to be one damn thing he is not. He's a large, funny-looking white man from Minnesota who, according to what I am watching right now, is not afraid to sing in the rain for an audience of people sitting in a softball field with umbrellas to watch his show.

"We see the world clearly when we are children," he says. "And we spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we saw."
That's not cosmic or even profound, but it's probably true. And that's soothing too- to hear things that are true but not trumpeted as Words To Live By.

He was just talking about the way he felt after his daughter was born and he'd just held her naked, newborn, six-pound body and he was so stunned at how ordinary birth is, and yet how amazing, and how amazing it is that it's so ordinary.

"I was afraid of living an ordinary life," he says, "And I realized, that's what everybody gets. And that's good enough."

That's so comforting to hear somehow. I think we all want to be different and amazing and famous and wonderful and the best, the very best at something and then, life goes on and we do finally realize that the most amazing things of all are the very most ordinary. The things that happen every day of our lives are the small miracles which add up to so much more than any of that other stuff would have.

God, it's all such a cliche, but it's true.

The way the light looks on my flowers when the sun is setting, the way the birds sound in the morning, the way the frogs sound at night. The way I can pick things out of my garden and cook them or pickle them and we can eat them and they give us pleasure and sustain us and the way the work I do to grow them sustains me too. The small and very important miracle of discovering a new book which is wonderful, a new song, a new bug I've never seen before. The discovery that I love chickens in my yard. My husband coming home every night and kissing me and telling me what a great supper! every night and the way yeast and flour come together with water and salt to make something incredibly delicious and that fills my house with a smell so good that you want to eat the air with butter and honey on it.
The fact that I can get up in the night and be soothed with a book and a bowl of cereal and then go lie back down beside that man and I like it when he snores- that soothes me too- and then fall into the ordinariness of sleep, one of my favorite things to do.

Tomorrow morning I'm going with Lily to the midwife and there you have the miracle of the most ordinary, like the one Mr. Keillor was talking about. Is my daughter really about to become a mother?
Yes. And soon.
And when she has her baby, it will be as if she had created life for the first time ever in the universe and in a way, it will be. It will be the first time that life has ever been created. That particular piece of life with its own unreasonably unique and individual DNA swirled and formed into a child with eyes and lips and hands and a sense of rhythm (surely) and a talent for art (maybe) with his or her own charms and strengths and weaknesses and hair color and fingernails and all of it will be there, right from the second she or he is born. A child who will see the world clearly and then spend the rest of his or her life trying to remember what he or she saw.
Just like every one of us.
Every damn one of us ordinary incredible miracles.

Maybe that's what blessourhearts is all about and I just realized it. That what I want to write about is the ordinary things, nothing more and nothing less. The kids, the husband, the gardens, the trees, the chickens, the dirt, the recipes, the bugs, the birds, the walks, the friends, the aging, the aches, the pains, the joys, the love, the light.

All the ordinary things which are good enough to make up an ordinary life which is filled with miracles every day.
My life, for example. My ordinary, miraculous life.

And that is good enough. Good enough for me.

And I am incredibly soothed by that thought.