What Is Miraculous?
Awed by Clock and Lamp
One morning I half-awakened to the morning light filtering through the drawn shade and curtains of my room. As I lay there with half-focused eyes viewing the yellow light on the blue carpet, I slowly became aware of myself seeing these colors. I found myself looking blankly and inexplicably out of myself at equally inexplicable surroundings.
The whole bubble or drop in space/time that was me happening in the happening world took on a radical unfamiliarity! It was as if a gathering thereness to the whole picture had zoomed into focus, surprising me by not making any particular sense. The lamp and alarm clock falling in my line of sight – what were they all about and how did they get there -- really? They seemed appearances from out of nowhere, or maybe Allwhere; certainly from out of no place and for no reason that I myself could adequately account for…
I could not have been more amazed by these objects if they’d started to sing and dance than I was by their sheer presence in front of my eyes that could see them.
One morning I half-awakened to the morning light filtering through the drawn shade and curtains of my room. As I lay there with half-focused eyes viewing the yellow light on the blue carpet, I slowly became aware of myself seeing these colors. I found myself looking blankly and inexplicably out of myself at equally inexplicable surroundings.
The whole bubble or drop in space/time that was me happening in the happening world took on a radical unfamiliarity! It was as if a gathering thereness to the whole picture had zoomed into focus, surprising me by not making any particular sense. The lamp and alarm clock falling in my line of sight – what were they all about and how did they get there -- really? They seemed appearances from out of nowhere, or maybe Allwhere; certainly from out of no place and for no reason that I myself could adequately account for…
I could not have been more amazed by these objects if they’d started to sing and dance than I was by their sheer presence in front of my eyes that could see them.
Posted by Paul at 11:59 AM Permalink
20 Comments:
Every now and then I get that feeling looking at my wife or daughter, like where did you guys come from? How long have we been together?
These are rich moments, poetically speaking. And other ...ally speakings :)
of course.
D
I've tried to live that way as much as possible, it can be done easier by mind-altering drugs or schizophrenia--(but too many unwanted side-effects!!)
Paul, I recall a poem that has been haunting me, ever since I read it last year--it was on this same subject--beautifully and transcendently written--since lost--
But who was that poet? Ah yes, I remember--
it was YOU!
If you would do us the great and generous favor of sharing what I believe to be your greatest poem to date (and I am not alone in this)--
PLEASE post your "shake and fries" poem--I miss it terribly...
To me, your experience is the same sort of thing in a way that cannot be put into words. You saw the world for what it truly is and permitted, if only for a brief moment, the facade of this world to fall away. Beyond words.
FIREBIRD: Yeah, I'd hate to see what the addition of mind altering drugs would have done to me... Usually trees, the beach, light - that's enough to do it. Alarm clocks and lamps less often!
I do have a large "backblog" of material, maybe I should do something off topic once in while.
SOULPEACELOVE: I tend to think so too - that it was more of a perception, although certainly a different way of seeing things than my usual way, than a distortion.
SALLY: Thanks and welcome. It's great to have some of that wonder return in adulthood. That's how it was for me - a lot of wonder/awe as a child, lost most of it in my teens through early twenties, then got it back I guess you could say in a new way.
I've gotten to where I write what I'm gonna write before reading what others have written, and while this occassionally makes fer redundancy, I also feel that I don't lose the spontanaity of the moment.
This time, however, I couldn't find where t'step.
I am slow of wit, to be sure, so I figured t'read some of the other comments to try'n'get caught up, so to speak, with the subject, and yet, all I got was more lost. Things are what they are, be they clocks or lamps or hour glasses or lanterns.
Heck, just a candle. What matter the time?
I see the sense in the simple being the miracle, but then, I think the greater miracles are better.
Fer example...some may already know that the place in the sea still opens up every once and a while. It isn't the Red Sea, but rather one adjacent to it, but the thing is, there's a strange formation of rocks around it coupled with an odd shape of rocks beneath the water that when the wind blows just right, the sea splits apart even to this day.
Is this a miracle?
Sure, but the other part is way more astounding.
That it stayed apart fer the time t'get them folks across to the other side and then waiting until the majority of the army was in harm's way (yeah, just because the sea pulls apart through the mechanics of wind doesn't make it any less a sea!) before crashing down on them.
A prayer answered is always a nice miracle to go with. 'Course it really gives me the red butt when I ask and ask and ask fer something really good and very important to me, but doesn't happen. Like praying fer Ma to not be so riddled with pain....
"...take her or make her better..."
not so easy a prayer that. Even though ceding to the mind of the CREATOR as being the all knowing...your way not mine that I usually take up, well, that she had so many more weeks of pain there in the hospital didn't actually improve my visions of GOD.
It was around then that I realized, death probably isn't as bad as we put it up to be.
But, the real knowledge is that, I dunno.
Heck, my very best intelligence, the epitome of the very smartest thing I know to be true....
is just a lark fer the CREATOR.
"What's a miracle?"
That we're allowed to be here at all. That we Are.
BONEMAN: Those last two sentences of yours are the gist of what I was experiencing. What you call the greater miracle is miracle as it's usually used and around which there's always a lot of debate since some people believe in this miracle and not that miracle or in no such miracles. Something I like about the first kind is that anybody can see it.
HAZZBUZZ: Interesting ideas - maybe young children/infants see things more in that way.
Yeah, familiarity does seem to make us stop appreciating the wonder of things - as if we confused our familiarity with them for some deep understanding of why things are as they are.
JANICE T: And there seem to be quite a few variations of the "one with the universe" kind of experience - genuine variations, I think, in the experiences themselves and not only in how people interpret them.
It is like an ant trying to describe the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa... I suspect we lack the language and brain capacity to even begin to digest the reality of some of the larger miracles.
The miracle of focusing upon a flower almost seems like a lesson in 'tasting' the reality of a galaxy, how do you move from minute to enormous?
And that, it seems to me, has never been more than inexplicable. Science tries to describe how it all works, how it's put together, how the parts interelate - but it literally comes along after the facts - and, for that matter, as part of the fact of everything that's happening, the whole process of the unfolding universe.
And to me it seems that statues shedding tears, water turning into wine etc. is a fundamentally different kind of thing. It's something some people believe in and others don't, whereas miracle in the sense of the mystery or inexplicability of being itself to me seems more like a perception.
Yes, this does appear to synchronise with the synchroblog. Did you read any of the other blogs listed at Notes from underground: Consciousness of absurdity and the absurdity of consciousness?
There's a similar incident in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea", when the protagonist is sitting on a park bench looking at a tree root, except that in his case the sight evokes the eponymous nausea. I suppose ordinary objects prompting extraordinary thoughts can work both ways.
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