I heard once that babies smile the first time they see a rainbow through their tears and it makes them want to cry again to see the miracle of color. Beauty can be so overwhelming that it does make us cry, and life is one beautiful miracle after another. How sad it is that we sometimes forget.
Every once in a while I get this great longing to “zoom out”. It is a process I go through when things threaten to get heavy or dull. When I feel that life seems ordinary, loud alarm bells ring inside my mind, because in fact, nothing in this world is ordinary. Life is awesome and full of awe inspiring miracles, from the moment we arrive to this planet with an erased memory and a vague sense of mission, to the nuclear spurts of growth we go through from embryos to adults, to the very simple yet unbelievable fact that we live on a ball that is spinning in a great unknown space and hurling through it at an impossible speed. So nothing is ordinary and it is sinful to treat it as such. How can anyone be bored knowing this??!!
At about age 5 or 6, my sister and I used to love playing house games with the neighborhood children in our village. We had an unfinished floor in our home that was still cement walls and bricks and we created our own pretend little world there. We had a basket tied to a rope from the kitchen window on the top floor and we snuck food ingredients down in it to create our own breads, coffee and other pretty disgusting recipes that we ate with total pride. We also found there an old discarded yellow closet that we declared to be our very own church. We acquired all sorts of iconic pictures, crosses and religious signs and hung them inside the walls of the yellow closet. We would go inside it with complete reverence and pray daily for miracles. One day a miracle finally happened. We heard a big bang on the walls of our little yellow church that made it vibrate miraculously! We ran yelling in awe and in great fear with shaking knees declaring our religious status and direct connection to all that is holy. It was only a couple of years later that our neighbor Nabiha, the very same one who offered us the yummy bread from her ‘saj’, gigglingly confessed to have thrown rocks at us to make believers out of us.
photo taken: My daughter visiting a favorite church or ours in the mountain in Lebanon.
Today I had a photo shoot with an adorable 3 week old baby girl, little Juliette! She has tiny little feet and the cutest little hands, and a face with a million changing expressions. Babies have the power to draw a smile from almost everyone who sees them. They are miracles, each single one of them and they are so innocent, clear, uncorrupted, reactive, connected, simple and yet very complex. To think of the amazing power that is with them to allow them to grow and multiply in size at an exponential speed! They heal much faster, they have during their growth a hundred times the energy we adults have and they can learn and absorb at stunning rate. Miracles!