Sunday, January 23, 2011

Turning the Mundane to the Sublime



I receive a few daily inspirational reminders in my email inbox every morning. Some of them are quotes. One that showed up on my screen today was " To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is"-----Pir Vilayat Inanyat Khan.

This simple statement grabbed my attention today and I immediately made an intention to stay awake to the lessons it can share as I accepted the challenge.

As the majority of my most profound life lessons, this one is simple. It causes me to pause and allow all of the complicating details I can so easily draw into the picture, to spontaneously erase.

What this message means to me is the challenge is not to find things or people to hold my attention, but to be fully present to them so what might typically feel ordinary or mundane will feel glorious.

This state of appreciating the gloriousness of life is not foreign to me. I often experience pure joy in the most simple or usual experiences. What was different today, was I started my day off by looking for the sublime, and to allow myself to feel it fully when it showed up, which was everywhere.

My day turned out to be pretty ordinary.... quiet Sunday morning at home with my husband and my dog. Laced within the ordinary happenings were the sublime experiences of appreciation, of fun and of gratitude. My simple life happens to include great comforts. My full attention to those comforts was sublime.

I also love to quip, find humor and laugh over a variety of unexpected things. My husband is a great source of these things, and today it was particularly sublime.

I enjoy connecting with strangers, and today I was especially open to the magic of these unexpected connections while grocery shopping, and later on a walk with my dog.

I love to cook and the soup that simmered on the stove for hours and later fed us, was sublime. The glass of merlot that accompanied this dinner was more sublime that usual.

Phone conversations, a home visit to a friend recovering from surgery, and some routine email correspondence all had more meaning than usual....simply because I was open to the sublime.

My life does not hold more sublimeness than anyone else's life. What made my mundane day special was that I was fully present to what showed up, appreciating all of it.

Even though it was pretty ordinary, how I felt was not.