I’ve decided that giving you a long list of my 54 resolutions is narcissistic at best. But dropping them into the Hump-Day report and other blog entries is less obnoxious and maybe more inspiring and entertaining. I’ll add subtitles to these reports to hint at each report’s contents. The first of these subtitles is Miracles.

“There are two ways to live your life. One is as through nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  –Albert Einstein

I rededicate my long-time resolve to embrace the mystery and live life as if everything is a miracle.

This long-help point of view bubbled up from my compost heap, as Robert Olen Butler calls it in his book on writing, From Where You Dream, and the thoughts of Sister Reba, an itinerant minister, who contemplates this very philosophy in a scene near the end of my novel Sufficient Grace:

“Now, people will tell you that miracles are a thing of the past, but Reba knows better. Without miracles, there would be no surprises. Sometimes they go by the name coincidence. Sometimes they go by the name accident. Sometimes they go by the names unexpected, longshot, curveball, miscalculation. Those who misconstrue the miraculous mistakenly assume the sacred to be awesome, overwhelming, exaggerated because they are too close to see the simple path daily miracles make. It can be more difficult to see a miracle than to spot transparent slug trails on a busy carpet. But Reba knows the sacred to be as daily as loaf bread and iceberg lettuce. The little things accumulate in such familiar and sometimes troubling ways, Reba writes on her pad, that we only see those small pieces and can’t step back and see the miracle that is there. Like the blind men feeling part of the elephant, we humans separate ourselves from the full picture of our own divinity. Reba lists all the daily ways her people can see their miracles. Her mind moves faster than her hand. She will take her message to the road from this quiet woods.” (Sufficient Grace, pp. 276)

Suggestions: List as many curveballs, accidents, coincidences, longshots, and miscalculations as you can that have caused change in your life, change that put you on a new and better path. 

Writing Exercise: Write about that list.

Writing Exercise: Write a poem about one of those events.

Writing Exercise: Give one of these experiences to a fictional character. See how they handle it differently than you did.

Note: There was no Tuesday blog this week, as you may have noticed. I spent yesterday with my three beautiful granddaughters: Ella, Vivian, and Emerson. No apologies. Sometimes miracles take priority.