Archive | January 6, 2012

An Un-Ordinary Blessing

     It rolls over me at times, joy, when I see sun shining through the small tree that was yellow-leafed and dancing in its morning bath of light.  

       Helen Keller said she didn’t, and couldn’t stop to think about what she didn’t have because that would lead her to despair. Without sight, without hearing, she wrote, and, “heard” what others had to say even though she was on that one way lane of disability. Sheer will, her teacher Anne Sullivan (one incredible woman also), faith, and a hunger for knowledge guided her way.   

English: Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell

Image via Wikipedia

     But all I have to do… is open my eyelids and see magnificence in the bark of a red oak, the reflection of blue in a pat of water receded from the drought, and the sunlight shooting rays softly through the late afternoon clouds. I can have all these things. Who am I? Just a common person on a wonderful big earth. Just an ordinary soul in an un-ordinary blessing called….life!

What the drought left

     And all I have to do is sit down at a piano, play, enjoy notes of calmness, the thrilling structure of a scale, a flat, or a sharp. Off to another world I go, to enjoy music which needs practice for sure, but trying is a pleasure. Just a simple tune that no one will ever hear but me. Just an ordinary pianist privileged to hear the notes blending together in harmony. Can you imagine the world without music?  So powerful it can instantly bring back to memory, a person, or an experience with just a few bars of melody!

Helen Keller, 3/4 lgth., standing; facing righ...

Image via Wikipedia

       All I have to do is speak or type the words and communicate a tiny part of an experience. To talk just like this is more than a paper-bag-lunch moment. To be able to speak in type, and  listen to others is like having lunch courtesy of Emeril, the master chef!   Just ordinary words rearranged to express something that I fished out of my soul. A privilege!

Emeril Lagasse, American celebrity chef, resta...

Image via Wikipedia

        If I could push life through a sieve to leave all of the good, and let the bad escape out the other side through all of those tiny holes… that would be wonderful, but I can’t.  Life will never leave me with only the best of everything. It doesn’t for anyone no matter how wonderful it looks on a magazine page. I accept it like it is: rugged, tragic, bursting with sorrow, sacred, precious, and it is a prism separating the invisible into rainbow colors…yes at times life is acheingly beautiful.  I am thankful. Now how did I get from Helen Keller to Emeril Lagassee?  Well I have no idea…sort of!          ….Terri O.A.