In the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, CT - just two towns from where I grew up in Ridgefield - like much of America and the world, I have many different emotions: grief, anger, sadness, and wonder at what has become of our country. And since about 2:30 am, I find myself thinking in images.
I'm a deeply material person in many ways, prone to fall hard for beautiful things like Hermes scarves, handicrafts that demonstrate care and artistry such as intricately embroidered textiles from South Asia, and things that link us to the past, like my grandmother's journals, or even the field guide I once found at a church rummage sale, How to Know the Wildflowers, into which a young woman back in 1904 and 1905 pressed flower specimens and wrote marginal notes about where she found them, on drives through the back roads of Connecticut with someone (a beau?) identified only as "R."
As any parent of a young child knows, the material of kids is so very commonplace: we're often sighing to ourselves as we encounter another balled-up sock or make the mistake of stepping on a stray Lego piece without shoes on. We roll our eyes at the crumbs in the lunchboxes and wadded-up papers in their backpacks, the PTA forms we didn't know were there, the single Hello Kitty glove. We rush to get them out the door and onto the bus with their math homework sheets complete and initialed, and sometimes, in the cold, if we're lucky, we even convince them to zip up their bright coats.
The mundane. The everyday "stuff" for many of us and our children. The very ordinary "stuff" that will forever mark the last day of those twenty first-graders.
Since my cancer diagnosis two years ago, I've tried to remind myself (but on some days needed reminding) that every day is a gift and an opportunity to practice and express love, even in the face of this broken world. The mundane is its own gift; it tells us that things are right in our own houses, that our rhythms and routines are intact.
At the bus stop this morning the sight of my daughter's green frog umbrella, with its big goofy, froggy grin, nearly undid me. She carried that umbrella in kindergarten and first grade, and second grade, and she hasn't grown too old or too cool for it yet, despite her pink hair and her braces. Stuff.
As we're writing to our congressional representatives about gun control and mental health, let's also pause to celebrate the mundane stuff and to find the grace in everyday life.
Edited 12/19/12 to add photo from March 2010.
