Surprise Me
I found a bowling ball in the meadow. No really, I did. Typically in the spring, after the snow melted in the Colorado high country, all sorts of interesting things were revealed that had previously gone unnoticed for years, decades or maybe even centuries. While I was pondering the thought of how the bowling ball got there, my eighteen-year-old son, had already grabbed an armload of small round logs from the stack of firewood up at the house and set them up in true “bowling alley” fashion. He always was one to seize the moment and this was a prime example. Instantly, what could have been an insignificant find, shrugged off, unexplained and quickly forgotten, was now ten minutes of pure joy I will never forget. All of my troubles, sorrows, worries and concerns vanished as we watched the giant marble slowly roll into the logs, knocking them over, one by one, “STRIKE!”. You would have thought we had just won a million dollars the way we carried on; laughing and setting up the “pins” over and over again.
Reflecting on this memory makes me think about the day in front of me. Where is the extraordinary in the ordinary? Whatever or wherever it is, I want to find it, I want to be surprised. As an artist, I know the magic that occurs when I study the details of something, such as a tree, or a horse grazing in the meadow or my half-full cup of coffee sitting on the glass table in front of me. Take the tree for example. I have driven past it at least a hundred times but when I give my full attention to the tree, the scars on the trunk, the broken off branches, the individual leaves and think about the stories it could tell, my heart is filled with wonder and a new appreciation for this extraordinary tree.
There is great magic in giving attention to something. I guess that is why it is also called “paying attention,” because my attention really is the most valuable asset I have.
Back to the bowling ball. Months later I had a revelation about how the bowling ball got there. When I was growing up, my sister and I raised 4-H pigs, a project I continued with my two boys. In 4-H, exercising the pigs was important in order for them to develop the desired muscle mass. We were always looking for ingenious ways to exercise them without having to take them on long walks. Since pigs love to play with balls we gave them a bowling ball to push around. Of course, it ended up buried deep in the mud, only to be “discovered” years later. And, yes, I wrote a song about it. How could I not? You just can’t make this stuff up. (Photo by Douglas Muth)
