Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
These are ordinary days. Growing up Catholic, these days meant that there was nothing to celebrate. It was the time between. In reality, ordinary days are what make up a life. Every day is an ordinary day until some event sparkles.
I have been reflecting on Wendell Berry's essay, The Gift of Good Land. He suggests:
"Does the hero have, in extreme circumstances, the courage to obey–to perform the task, the sacrifice, the resistance, the pilgrimage that he is called on to perform? The drama of ordinary or daily behaviour also raises the issue of courage, but it raises at the same time the issue of skill; and, because ordinary behaviour lasts so much longer than heroic action, it raises in a more complex and difficult way the issue of perseverance. It may, in some ways, be easier to be Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years."
Every day I perform tasks that feel ordinary: turning off the lights as I leave the room; walking to the corner store to get the one item I need for dinner, and picking up a crushed pop can and plastic food storage dish along the way; lighting a candle to bring warmth to my room. Ordinary.
What changed by the doing of these ordinary actions? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something small shifts in the web of attention that holds a neighbourhood together. Perhaps the corner shop owner notices one more person choosing to walk rather than drive. Perhaps the person who comes after me on that same pavement doesn't step over the next crushed can. Perhaps the candlelight that falls across my page creates a quality of evening that my tired mind recognizes as beautiful, and this recognition becomes the ground from which tomorrow's patience grows.
Berry's wisdom lives in that word "skill." Anyone can fling themselves into a dramatic gesture. The child learns this early, staging elaborate scenes to demonstrate devotion or distress. But to turn off lights consistently, year after year, in a culture that shrugs at waste? To choose the longer walk when the car sits ready? To bend down for the twentieth piece of rubbish that week when no one is watching, and the pavement will be littered again by morning? This requires something more nuanced than heroism. It requires the cultivation of attention itself.
I think of my mother, who saved twist ties and washed plastic bags and turned the thermostat down at night for all of her years. Nothing heroic in any single action. But the cumulative effect of ninety years of skilled noticing, ninety years of small resistances to convenience and carelessness—this shaped not only her household economy but the very quality of her presence. She moved through the world lightly. She wasted nothing, including attention.
This is what ordinary days ask of us: not the spectacular sacrifice that earns applause, but the daily choice to live as though our small actions matter. Because they do. Not in the way headlines register significance, but in the way soil registers the patient addition of organic matter. Slowly. Accumulatively. Creating the conditions for something to grow that we may never see fully flourish.
The candle burns down. Tomorrow I will light it again. I will walk past litter and choose what to carry home. I will turn off the lights in empty rooms. These are not the acts that make a life legible from the outside. They are, instead, the substance from which a life is actually made. Ordinary days. Which is to say: every day that we are given. Every chance to practise the courage, not of dramatic refusal, but of sustained, skilled attention to what is actually within our reach to tend.
"The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true, and the solutions are no nearer to hand."
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-Phronesis-
A way of being in the world that shows concern with one’s life, with the lives of others now & in the future and all ways we touch the world.
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Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
