Normalized Magnificence
Falling in love again with the beauty that surrounds you
Dear Reader,
Some of our beloved family arrives on the island this week. While they undoubtedly look forward to the ample sunshine, bare feet, and bobs in the salt water, we count the days each year to their arrival because it means that we too will be leaving the metaphorical “do not disturb” on the door and the phone off the hook. We do not live by an itinerary when we’re together, instead, our time is marked by nightly co-conspired family dinners, afternoon group naps in the patches of sun of a living room, slow evening walks to admire what’s growing in the garden or to catch an expansive view or the sunset. For approximately two weeks, we just live, together.
In exchange, they offer us our needed fix of the city — urban coffee shops, neighborhood walks to admire the charming landscaping and well-paired paint colors, abundant eateries that are open past dark, the magic of DoorDash, and the hidden green gems that are their favorite parks for playing. It is through inviting each other into our worlds that we fill the cups of our senses with pleasures anew and, in the return of hosting, fall in love again with the familiar.
I was raised in Northern California, at the southern end of where the lasts of the big trees still stand. The home I grew up in was graced with three of these giant beauties in the front yard. For me, the redwoods, as impressive as they are, were not visually noteworthy but rather deeply familiar, like my childhood bedroom, and symbolic of home. Many a photo was taken at the base of the Mother Tree over my young years, and a beloved pet buried. My island-raised husband encountered these colossi as a young man in collage, spent four years in their company, and still lives in absolute awe. When we returned together to visit them many years back, I finally saw what he saw. The quiet filtered light through the canopy, the girth of the trunk that would require many linked hands to wrap one’s arms around it. I felt small and infantile before them, at the feet of an ancient sage.
Coming from the land of some of the world’s oldest trees, I now call this comparatively young island home, where new land is often still being made. Throughout my twelve-plus years here, I still in many ways admire its beauty with my outsider’s eyes while other details have become absorbed into and a part of me. It’s not until I’m on the phone with my mother that she reminds me of the active harmonies of tweets, coos, and chirps of my local birdsong, which has blurred into the background soundtrack of my everyday. For a moment, I hear it again, and recall it as a sensual memory of my early days here, along with a prominent view of Orion’s Belt and avocados with hot chili garlic sauce scooped up with chips.
There are new mundane magical things that punctuate this chapter in time here. In this moment right now, which feels particularly characteristic, is the patter of rain on the window panes, the mower in the distance, the soft breathing of an old, napping cat. Life can be quite ordinary even in paradise — we go to work, tend the yard, run errands, cook dinner — and through it we do our best to live at a pace that keeps us present to our gratitude for it all. But when we’re able to really pause, to set down the hammer, to send the OOO notification, to share our tiny wonderful world with others, it is through their wide and bright eyes that we fall in love again with the magnificence around us.
OOO (out of office),
