There are Miracles Still on this Planet
When the year that just had to be better than the last one fails to live up to our hopes, double down on the search for miracles.
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If you started 2022 with the incantation, This year has got to be better than the last, and that is not yet evident;
If the drumbeat that reverberates in your bones is not a call to dance, but to dread;
If your dogs are antsy, your kids hate school, and you are grasping toward a dim light at the end of the tunnel, remember:
There are miracles still on this planet.
Chance meetings on a sidewalk. Tea with milk. A laughing fit with tears and stomach spasms that carries you longer than it has a right to do.
A yes from your teenager’s mouth. Touching your toes at 52; Cinnamon, honey, bananas.
Toddlers on scooters wearing helmets as big as their bodies. Hearts drawn in lattes. Me, having dogs.
There are miracles still on this planet.
Lavender bushes in bloom. A whiff of jasmine on an afternoon walk. Seeing yourself through someone else’s generous eyes.
Spitting tangerine seeds off a balcony onto forest floor, imagining its journey via some squirrel or bird to another hillside, against all odds becoming more tangerines.
There are miracles still on this planet.
Thoughts that become words, in a mind directing fingers to move ink across a page. Teachers who teach letters, printers who make paper, notebook manufacturers, truck drivers, sales clerks, desk-makers and house-builders, all of them coming together in a moment of your mind reading mine.
There are miracles still on this planet. What in this world isn’t?
* This piece came from a prompt by writer, teacher and coach Dana Childers, based on a poem by Maya Stein.
Laura Nicole Diamond is the award-winning author of Shelter Us: a novel, and Dance with Me: a love letter, and editor of the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She is at work on a memoir about becoming a foster mom to a teenage asylum-seeker. Follow her on Medium, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and LauraNicoleDiamond.com.
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