Posted on 05 Jan, 2011 -
The Poetry of Life
There are 5000 different kinds of ladybirds worldwide
They are mostly carnivorous - eating as many as 270 aphids per day
They won’t fly if the temperature is 13° C or lower. But WHY am I telling you this?!
Dear Reader,
For the past twenty minutes I have been watching a ladybird.
It is a misty day and as I walked past the landing window it was just sat there on the window sill - almost entirely motionless, near a crack in the paint.
Perhaps it could feel my warmth breath on it? My own face was so close to the window pane that I could feel the cold coming in onto my forehead and sniff the smell of the glass.
The more I watched it, the more I became transfixed. For ages it would do nothing then it would slowly stretch out one leg. Then another. Then the antennae would twitch. At one point, the whole body did a kind of tilt, just a fraction to one side. But it stayed on the same spot. The only other living thing in this very quiet house but me.
The whole street seemed so quiet, in fact, that for those twenty minutes it was like there was just me and that ladybird. The existence of that one tiny being more real and vivid and alive and enormous than anything I normally experience in a day.
If only more days were as slow and full as this one
Because isn’t that life? We are so surrounded by amazing life that if we stopped to gaze at every incredible leaf or mist rising out of the earth or setting sun then we would never getting anything done. If we allowed the awe that should surely overcome us every time we stopped to ponder on the 200 billion galaxies in the universe… the 1 million individual filters in each of our kidneys ... or the complexity of every atom of every hair, of every leaf, of every seed… then our hearts might truly burst.
(I’ve also just found out that snails can sleep for as long as three years so I’m not giving up on my ladybird yet.)
The poetry in life, in objects and in ourselves
There is surely also poetry in every object we see. Look around us and we might see how even every object speaks to us and has its own story to tell.
But how much of our daily lives do we actually spend connected to or observing this amazing poetry? Some maybe more than others. But most of us probably not enough.
Surrounded as we are by so much machinery and man-made stuff, our lives can become more grounded in the material, in the concrete and scientific ‘truth’. There is the belief that there should be definite and scientific answers to all questions. Right or wrong answers. Black and white thinking.
Even religion is now mostly out of the picture - which at least brought some colourful mythology into our lives. A belief in the supernatural. In the stuff between the lines.
And what of our thoughts about ourselves? Even there it seems that there is little room for nuance. We are either confident or self-doubting… a success or a failure… extrovert or introvert… pretty or plain. But reality is never like that.
The image that we have of ourselves is far too boxed in and confined. We should allow ourselves more space. See ourselves as larger. Expanding into the universe.
If you were a plant what plant would you be?
What is in a sound?
How many atoms in a glass of water - and what happens to them when you drink it?
What and where is the ‘I’ you talk about when you talk about yourself?
What does a mirror look like when there’s nobody in the room to observe it?
What would it feel like to be eternal?
And what is the most vivid and alive thing that you can see near you right now?
Best wishes for another week
