Here's a thought: if you don't believe in miracles, consider the humble bumble. Look at the fragility of those wings. Look at the body it has to lift. Look at the complete lack of aerodynamic shaping. Look at all that fluffy, furry, air-catching hindrance. Then tell me that the bee can fly. How can there be enough muscle power to even get aloft, never mind then dance in the air?
Is the miracle that the bee can fly?
Or is the miracle that it never occurs to a bee that it can't?
This particular bee - the one in the photo - is another miracle, because it and its colleagues came down to talk to me. I was cutting back the golden rod. It's all dying, from the ground up, and from the top down. It's all flopped to the horizontal, and has no strength to stand up again, and although I feel bad about cutting anything while it's still in flower, on this occasion doing so would give it time to regroup at root level, and also allow the things around it to take a share of what little water there is to be had. So I set about cutting, and bagging up to await the emptying of the garden waste bin. The garden was quiet but for the grasshopper fest that is ongoing.
But not for long.
A bee that had been foraging the salvias came over to see what I was doing...and within five minutes or so, the fallen golden rod was awash with a variety of bees and wasps and hover flies. It felt like someone had sent out an alarm call: quick - this food source is being ripped away - get here now!
And they did.
I don't like cutting things while they're still in flower, so there's just no way I'm going to, when they've been descended upon by the local possee, intent on protecting their source. I stopped cutting. For now at least.
If the flight of the bee is a miracle, is it not a greater one that it could come and tell me: please, stop that! A greater one yet, that I might listen and say: ok.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying that "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
It had never occurred to me before this minute to wonder which side he was on. I've always assumed he was a believer in miracles - but maybe he thought that if everything could be explained scientifically we'd have no need of the miraculous.
I don't want to believe that. I want to believe that he believed in how miraculous everything is...mainly because I want to believe I would have liked the guy if I'd ever met him...and if he was one of those who had no faith in something beyond what we think we know, if he had no sense of awe and joy in the mundane, then I probably wouldn't have.
I believe in miracles. Just being alive is one, for a start. All the things that have to have aligned for me to even be here on this planet at all, let alone to have gotten through all the years and everything within them since I arrived to be here now, who I am, in this moment. To have what I have, to be able to do what I do...there is no scientific reason why any of it should be so, rather than not so.
You can call it chance. I can call it a blessing. The miracle is somewhere between the two, maybe.
Like many things, a miracle is only such a thing if you choose to see it that way. I spent a part of today thinking about how it might be to live not recognising the miraculousness of our world, to live with a world-view in which you might prescribe what counts as a miracle, perhaps very narrowly, in terms of what you want or need in the moment.
When my brother was first death's-door ill, my sister-in-law asked for a miracle. I don't know whether she prayed to a god she believes in, or simply offered up her pain to the universe. I only know that afterwards she told me: we needed a miracle, and we got one. I hope that strengthened her faith in who- or what-ever she asked for that miracle. Maybe it's what is still keeping him with us through repeated episodes of life-threatening trauma.
I wonder what it means that when my loved ones - Mam, Dad, Clive - were at the brink, I never once asked that they be held back here, with me. I only asked that their passing be peaceful and that I would have the strength to carry on. In retrospect, I have to wonder if that were a selfish prayer. Certainly, I wasn't asking for any kind of miracle. Only humanity.
Or maybe the miracle I wanted, was to be able to do what I was meant to do, to be happy doing it, to continue onwards, without them: maybe that was miracle enough for me.
Miracle enough. There's an idea.
Miraculous enough for me today started with the notion of being alive. As someone once said: any day above ground is a good day!
I guess 'miracles' depend on your base-line. Things we take for granted today, would have been unbelievable a few decades ago. The dictionary definition of a miracle is that it is something that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws - but that misses the point that those laws are limited by our understanding of them. Would Newton have understood that the mobile phone is scientific rather than miraculous? Would Gallileo?
For me: the miracle isn't so much that these things exist, rather that there was somewhere a human imagination that believed that they could and then worked out how.
Today I had the notion of looking for miracles, and so I found them. I found...
...the bees on the golden rod I was trying to chop down;
...mobile phones that keep me in touch with friends I never knew I would have;
...this weird thing we have where squiggles on a piece of paper or a screen communicate thoughts from one person to another;
...a blue sky, that represents the very thin layer of atmosphere that means there can be any kind of life on this planet;
...that such life includes small white butterflies doing a mating dance and a cacophonous Christian rock band practicing in the church hall;
and, just maybe, that someone, somewhere will read this and think a little differently because of it. That would be another miracle, even though I will never know.
Another thought that I had: it is not for me to tell you what a miracle is. It is not for me to ask you to believe in any kind of happening as miraculous. The only thing I can say, for sure, is that I see miracles around me every day - in bee-flight, in rose-bud, in blue sky and thunderstorm, in being loved by people I would never have expected to step into my life, in the technology I am using to share this with you, in language, in transport, in falling stars, in the weeds that I uproot from my garden, in coming back to the dancefloor - and if you want to write any of that off as 'chance' or 'meaningless', feel free. For me, it's a few more drops of joy.
That's the point about miracles. They are the raw material of joy...if only we know how to harvest them.
