Ordinary Miracles

Mallard Duck. Robert Bunch/APA.

I don’t usually go to my neighborhood coffee shop in the morning because it’s often crowded and I’m eager to get to my studio before the sun is high but I did go Thursday and, as I waited for my coffee, I looked around the big sunny room. There was a display of prints by a local artist on the walls and a big rack of magazines, now a rarity, as well as several newspapers, and maybe twenty people were sitting, each alone at a small table, all of them absorbed in their cell phones—and it seemed to me so beautiful, such a miracle, that I wondered why we were not all dancing and shouting jubilee.

Easter was just behind us with its glorious music, the pope had just died and tributes were flowing in from all over the world. Yesterday he was buried in a plain wooden coffin in a small church in Rome—not the basilica—and hardened leaders from all over the world, gathering for the ceremony, might perhaps have felt something—a touch of respect, even admiration for a pope who brought the whole world together (or tried to) and whose most notable pronouncement was, “Who am I to judge?”

An ordinary miracle.

Later on Thursday, when I took my usual walk to the pond, I was astonished and delighted to see a male and a female Mallard standing at the edge. Although Mallards are our most common duck, I’ve never seen them here in the dry and mountainous southwest, and it seemed a second ordinary miracle. I’m hoping perhaps they’ll feel safe enough to stay, nest, and produce a small fleet of ducklings.

As Mary Oliver told us in “Wild Geese,” “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination…”

Another ordinary miracle.

In Religion Mary Oliver Birds Pope Francis