From the archives: September 25, 2022.
On a rainy Sunday afternoon, there was a break in the clouds. The sun came out and we decided to visit Duke Gardens. We gathered with other befuddled visitors around the kiosk where one was supposed to pay for parking. A man fished a dollar bill out of the end of the long wooden tube he was carrying. Everyone made a failed attempt to nudge their crumpled bills into the slot.
We gave up. We walked through the garden gate. We followed paths that meandered past tiny waterfalls, bamboo groves, scarlet-stemmed bushes. We rounded a curve and heard music from a hidden place. The man we had seen at the kiosk was playing his flute in harmony with a brooklet, down in a little hollow concealed by foliage.
On the terraced hillside above us, an Indian woman in a green sari performed a graceful traditional dance while her husband recorded her performance.
A short time later, the clouds closed, and the rain fell again.
It was a bright moment on a dark afternoon. Sunlight glistened briefly on droplets still clinging to leaves. The flutist was unaware of the dancer. The dancer might have been too far way to hear the flutist, or she might have heard him with delight at the coincidence. Anyone elsewhere in the garden heard only the flutist, or saw only the dance, or saw and heard nothing at all. The dancer performed for a short while. Then she stopped. We might never have looked up at the terrace and seen the dancer. We might never have known who was playing the flute. I assumed the music was coming from a speaker, and only discovered the musician when I peered behind a bench and saw the top of his head.
I looked up miracle in the dictionary my aunt gave me for my high school graduation:
A person, thing, or event that excites admiring awe.
In other words, a miracle only becomes a miracle in the eyes of the beholder.
A miracle is always good, at least for the person who experiences it.
Miracles can be small:
I found a parking spot!
Somebody stole my neighbor's leaf blower!
Or large:
A tiny announcement in a free paper led my friend to her lifelong spiritual path.
The miracle of the Webb telescope reveals the infinite miracle of the universe.
I wonder about the miracles I'm missing as I wade through my preoccupations. My meditation practice reminds me to notice whatever happens. If I’m paying attention, an experience might arrange itself into miracle.
A miracle depends on where you're standing. The collection of stars in the constellation we call Orion only appears to viewers of a particular culture on a particular planet at a particular time of year. Other cultures use different names. Other planets don't see the pattern at all.
A miracle doesn't exist until we see it into being. Until then, it's only a dance.