Beauty In The Mundane

My 8 year old joins me on the couch with a clipboard in hand and asks if I can watch her draw. We sit, snuggled up, and I watch as she feverishly marries crayon to paper. She’s fully dialed in, her attention unbreakable, eyes locked on her creation, and I watch intently. It’s almost as if I can feel the energy moving from her brain to her hand, an expression of herself moving through her into the external, in the form of a tangible drawing. In this little pause I can not only see, but also feel, who she is as I watch her create.

Sitting on the couch watching my child draw, it’s a mundane thing, really. Most of my life as a mother is. At some point along this journey I realized that I could try to chase an (unreachable) glitz & glam, or I could shift the way I see the mundane in my day-to-day. Finding beauty in the moments that feel like they don’t matter, but when we look back, they’re actually the ones that do. 

Seasonally, I see the mundane approaching. As the trees become more & more bare, the glitz & glam of nature is stripped away. At first glance, we might just see barren trees & gray skies, a sigh leaving us as an expression of disappointment in the missing beauty that once was. But what might we find in the “boringness” of this season? In the quiet? 

May we move through the mundane with the feverishness of a child, fully present and locked in on what’s right in front of us.