This Day That We Have Never Seen Before

Every day, before we began to work, Charles would gather us in a circle, invite us to join hands as he prayed, “Heavenly Father, thank you for this day that we have never seen before.”

Charles lifted up that prayer eighteen years ago, in a driveway of New Orleans, as the city was just beginning to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I was there as part of a team from Concord and Acton, assigned to rebuild Charles and Winnie Wilmore’s house.  Charles is hard to forget; a retired postal worker who was living in a toxic FEMA trailer parked in front of the house that he and Winnie had moved into just three weeks before the storm. When they looked out the window of that cramped and shabby trailer, the first thing they’d see was their ruined dream. And yet, and yet…every morning, without fail, he would bow his head and thank God for a new day, a day that had yet to unfold, when anything might happen. And, if he’s still around, I have no doubt he’s saying it now.

I want to be like Charles. I want to begin every morning, waiting for what the day would offer; to discover something I have never seen before.  I want to start each day with “beginner’s mind”, as a small child who is just learning about her world.

As I did one day last week. In the blaze of the rising sun, a soft wisp of white floated in the breeze. A bit of thistledown? a small feather swept from an empty nest?  The day was bright with thin silk threads of rain falling silently over the far field. Near my feeder, a hummingbird, resplendent in her glossy emerald dress, stood on the air, moving neither up, down nor sideways, wings humming, drumming, until, quick as a wink, she dipped down, sipped and took off.   My door was left open; a honeybee flew in.   Finding nothing sweet, it buzzed out, in search of nectar. A  locust tree, standing tall near my porch, dropped its slender leaves, carpeting the grass in gold.

Drinking my mug of coffee, I sat silently, remembering the poet’s words: “Every day I see something that more or less kills me with delight…”    I’m pretty sure what delighted Mary Oliver wasn’t something she’d never seen before.  Like Charles, her delight was about THAT  morning, a day barely begun. As for me, I have no idea how many hummingbirds I’ve seen in my long life, nor bees that I’ve let out of my house. But I have never seen THAT green bird, nor THAT bee. And while I’ve seen leaves float to the ground every fall for over 80 years, I had definitely never seen those golden leaves, for they weren’t even “a twinkle in the honey locust’s eye” last year.

Many years ago my son, a brand new father, taught me a very wise lesson.  They had just brought their newborn daughter home. When I arrived a day or so afterwards, she was just waking up, ready to be fed.  I was the typical grandmother, yearning to hold her as soon as I could, and so I offered to change her before handing her to her mother. As I laid her on the changing table, my son came up beside me, looking skeptical, a bit anxious. “I think I can do this,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve never changed a diaper before!”

“That’s true, Mom, but you’ve never changed MY baby’s diaper before!”

Need I say more?!