All around us, life bursts forth with miracles – a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, a Raven, laughter and love, raindrops and wind.

If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere daily. I’m just beginning to awaken to the small miracles of life; they are all around me. Maria sees them all the time.

“Each human being,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, “is an assortment of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms, ears that can hear a bee flying or a thunderclap, a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos, a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”

I never saw anything I recognized as a miracle for most of my life. I was too distracted by work, money, and self. Life was frightening to me.

Before writing this, I took Zinnia out to throw a ball for her in the pasture this afternoon. It was a world of small miracles.

I counted the miracles I saw in just a few minutes: the sheep eating the brush hogged grass, the dog who saw a red ball dropped a hundred yards away and carried it back to me, the blue sky shielding the afternoon sun, a Raven in the Maple tree, a chipmunk running (successfully) from Bud, a flock of geese heading for warmth, a beautiful picture from a small metal box, a machine that takes what I write and sends it out to the world, a fox darting through the woods, an Amish cart full of singing daughters, a young cat waiting to walk with me.

At the Subway where I bought my sandwich, I saw a group of autistic children from the high school making sandwiches for me and others; they came as part of a school project and did an excellent job. The staff was kind and encouraging to them, and they made my sandwiches; although none of them could speak, they could listen.

When I got home, there was a box from Texas filled with gorgeous vintage fabrics for Maria and the artists at Bishop Gibbons High School. I can see how easy it is to take these things for granted, but once I started paying attention to the small miracles of life,  it awakened me to the small miracles in my life, all around me, every day. I saw the world differently.