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“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.”
Einstein.
I walk out into my backyard this morning, the very picture of sleepy not-yet-togetherness. Paint-splattered hand-me-down sweatpants stolen from my ex’s goodwill bag, ginormous pilly sweater and no bra, hair unbrushed, and bangs sticking straight up from the headband I wore to sleep. Old fuzzy slippers (leopard print, naturally) all stretched out and falling off my feet.
I’m making my way to the citrus trees that grow against the back wall. Oranges, tangerines, pink and yellow grapefruit; a still life gradient of sunset hues against concrete block. A row of my very own trees laden with winter fruit, can you imagine?
I step into the grass and sink—nay, I squelch—onto earth overflowing with the runoff of a three-day rain, an icy shock seeping through these worn-out slippers and mismatched quitter socks (they were already sliding annoyingly off my heels even before I landed in this miniature lake). “Ugh, fuck” I think for just a second, before remembering where I live and what this means.
I raise my eyes and give thanks, despite the icy cold spreading up my legs. Here in the desert—where it only rains 36 days out of the entire year—this much precipitation is a miracle, by any measure. This week especially, when thousands of souls in the unincorporated Phoenix-adjacent Rio Verde foothills (where many wells have long since run dry) had their municipal water supply cut due to drought, it feels even more precious.
In this valley of saguaro and tumbleweed, which received only 12.03 inches of rainfall in 2022, the life force of water is undeniable. So yes. My cold wet feet were a reminder to raise gratitude and offer prayer.
Yes. Thank you. More, please.
I think back to when I first moved here way back in 1999, a 23-year-old ocean transplant so far from home. Four days and 3600 miles in a Uhaul with my then-brand-new-now-ex-husband delivered this small-town seaside girl to her new desert home. Straight from a childhood of frigid Northeastern Canadian winters (snow drifts higher than my head, I tell you), right into the boiling cauldron of Phoenix in September (where, just for funsies, eggs can be fried on the sidewalk and cookies baked in one’s car).
I remember how walking outside at night felt like being whole-body-shoved into the open oven left waiting by Hansel and Gretel's witch. I had no concept of air so scorching it would fill my lungs with a blast of heat, even long after the sun had dipped below the horizon line. Or at least I had no concept until it was my reality.
But I also remember how, months later during my first winter, I marveled at the wild reality that one could pluck citrus fruit—with bare hands—off a tree in the middle of January. What audacity this earth had, to make something so marvelous so easily possible. What excess. What bliss.
How utterly extravagant it felt—to this girl who only knew such riches from the supermarket—to waltz out my friend’s back door, peruse the trees and carefully select the largest orb from branches low enough to reach without even standing on my tiptoes.
I peeled it right then and there, marbled skin twisting off in easy sections, pushed my thumbs into the center, and pulled until two perfect half moons laid gently in my palms. I savored each crescent slowly, juices dripping down my fingers, spitting the seeds into the grass where perhaps they would be eaten by a bird, only to later give birth to another tree.
It is not an overstatement to tell you that I can easily remember this as an experience of wonder, that it expanded my understanding of possibility, and that yes—it felt like a giddy sort of never-before-considered miracle.
It took me over 20 years in this desert to live in a house with my very own citrus trees. The first day, after signing the lease at my current home, I walked out in wonder. Two decades after I first landed in the desert and I was still blown away that this bounty was all mine. All winter long, until the trees were bare, I ate from my personal orchard.
Two grapefruit, no sugar needed, for breakfast, enough juice left to tip up the bowl to my mouth and drink it down. An orange or two in the afternoon, maybe one before bed. Then, in the spring, the heavenly scent of citrus blossoms wafting everywhere, reminding me that there was abundance yet again to come. Throughout the whole month of April, I sat in my backyard, breathing as deeply as I could, absorbing that scent into my being.
Today, almost two years later, I stand in my kitchen, frying the perfect crispy egg with slightly runny yokes, topping it with a sprinkle of pink Himalayan sea salt and cracked red pepper, spooning a somewhat ridiculous amount of burn-your-mouth off spicy salsa verde across the top. I opened the fridge to look for something to counter the heat but found nothing. Only then did I look out the window above my sink and spy those trees, branches drooping under the weight of their offering.
I realized I had not consumed more than one or two grapefruits all season.
There is more fruit in my own backyard than I can eat. When I take my garbage out to the space between my house and the next, my landlord’s trees are so full that the branches dip over his fence, low enough that I have to duck under them. Down the street, several neighbors place buckets on the curb—lemons and limes and giant grapefruit the size of a small bowling ball—with signs that say “free - please take as many as you want”.
We have more than we need, yes. But sometimes we are so accustomed to the abundance that surrounds us that we fail to notice, appreciate and consume even what we can.
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
— Sylvia Plath
I pluck two pink grapefruits from the tree and return inside, wet slippers trailing footprints across the polished concrete floor. I choose a serrated knife and slice—always across the ‘equator’ as I was taught—circling around the edge and then carefully between each triangular segment. I scrape each cut half into a white bowl and repeat the process with the second fruit.
I sit then, with my perfect fried egg and too much for most but just enough for me green salsa, my already three times reheated coffee, and my library book, and I take the first spoonful.
Grapefruit has a bite of course, more refreshing than saccharine. The pink are gentler than the yellow, I have found. These are the perfect sort of tart, just sweet enough to not require sugar. I eat the egg, and the fruit, finish the coffee while it’s still hot for once, and find a passage from my book too good not to write down in the little journal I keep on my dining room table.
Suddenly, I have a flash of memory and text my mother to confirm. Yes, she tells me, I remember correctly.
My grandfather, a country boy with nine younger siblings who dropped out of grade school to work in the woods, would get oranges in his Christmas stocking. In rural Nova Scotia in the 1920s and ’30s, citrus fruit was an expensive commodity. A rare and precious treat to be exclaimed over and savored, a desire most families only could afford to indulge during the holidays.
I imagine my grandfather consuming that single Christmas orange. How he must have felt, biting into the pulpy flesh and savoring the tart-sweet taste born of a sort of sunshine Atlantic Canada does not know, knowing the memory would need to last him an entire year. I imagine, to this eventual patriarch of my family, who in a small village where the trees yielded only bitterly hard wild crab apples, that first taste of orange might have felt like its own kind of Christmas miracle.
Could he have imagined a world where his granddaughter would one day get so busy with life that she’d fail to eat even one of the hundreds of perfectly ripe citrus in her own backyard? Could he have contemplated an existence where something that precious could be so commonplace as to be an afterthought, blurring into the background of life?
What would he do, if I could magic his childhood self back into existence and transport him into this very backyard? Would he have gone mad with glee? Would he have stuffed himself until he felt ill? Would he have been utterly incredulous that the residents of this house had barely noticed the fruit growing so ripe it fell off the tree to be eaten by birds?
And would he, a boy raised by the abundant water of the sea, where rain was so common as to be a frequent annoyance, have been equally confused by the fervent prayer of gratitude I offered to the rain gods this morning? Think it entirely strange how we peek outside excitedly when the sky gets even slightly cloudy and dark. How we check our weather apps in anticipation. How, at the first drops of rain, the children run into the street exclaiming with wonder. How even adults (at least ones like me who have not grown up so much that they forget how) will rush outside to twirl and spin and dance in the rain, brought to life by the way the monsoon falls in a deluge and the lightening flashes so it lights up the whole damn sky. How the water runs rivers in the street because the earth here cannot open fast enough to soak it in.
I think about what we name miracle. What we call magic. What we deem worthy of revelation. Where we direct our prayers and where we offer breathless thanks for that which seems so uncommon as to be astonishing.
And then, what fades into the background, taken for granted simply because here and now—in this time or location or life—it is plentiful, at hand, because there is more than-more than-more than enough. Because it came to us easily. Because it was possible for it to come to us at all.
The dictionary defines a miracle as “a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences.”
Something is missing here, I think now, taste of citrus still alive on my tongue and brain spiraling to make sense of something new to me.
Improbable and extraordinary. Exactly. But by whose definition?
“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
What if that which is a miracle cannot be measured objectively? Cannot be contained by an across-the-board, one-size-fits-all designation. No stringent scientific process by which one can say “this is a miracle, while that is not”.
Unless one is the Catholic church, of course, which has long attempted to gate-keep the naming of miracles by requiring that they meet certain criteria, namely that “the event is an extraordinary (contrary to the ordinary natural and supernatural course of things), sensible (subject to perception by the senses) effect wrought by god, that surpasses the power and order of created nature”. 1
For a healing to be considered miraculous, for instance, it must be "complete, instantaneous, and durable, as well as scientifically inexplicable".2
I don’t know about you, but this seems more like the dying gasps of an entity determined to maintain control over what we have the right to call holy than it will ever be any sort of systematically rigorous process that could stand up to unbiased inquiry.
But that’s really the point, isn’t it? That miracles are inherently biased. That miracles should be, must be, HAVE to be a matter of perception.
Why would we want a systematically rigorous process to quantify the relative importance of blessings, goodness, and too-crazy-amazing-to-be-real-old-fashioned-good-luck? Doesn’t that pull us away from the holy gratitude and essential awe?
And isn’t that gratitude and awe the entire point?
What we name miracle is more about the direction of our singular hunger.
It is a measure, most often, of what is scarce. What feels so rare as to be tinged with mysticism, where the getting feels near impossible and the having feels like some sort of sacred privilege. When what we have never known, do not expect to find, and cannot fathom we will be permitted to possess appears, and we hold out our fumbling, open hands and hold it in front of us (even for a moment)…of course, we name this miracle.
To a thirsty human stumbling through the desert, baking in the relentless heat of the high noon sun, the small pool of water is extraordinary, a gift from a higher power that signifies the difference between life and death. To one who lives on the bank of a rushing river, shielded by a canopy of endless green, the water may be beautiful, even subject to reverence and appreciated entirely. But will it move that human to glorious rapture on the daily? Probably not.
What we assume we can easily access. What we fail to notice because it is so plentiful as to be ordinary, commonplace. What we pass by every day without wonder. None of these are any less extraordinary or important or worthy of attention.
We’ve just forgotten what they felt like the very first time, how much they mean to someone who cannot know the experience, how rare what is ordinary to us might be if born into a different body, a different location, a different life.
The citrus trees in my backyard.
The rain falling into the endless ocean.
The food stuffing our fridges to overflowing.
The lover we can lay our hands on each night in our sleep who has the cheesiest humor and wild anxiety and overuses that one emoji, but who cuts all the onions to save us the tears, and washes the dishes and takes the car to get detailed when it’s trashed.
The ground beneath our feet. The air in our lungs. The nerves of our spinal cord. The beat of our hearts.
The beat of our hearts.
The beat of our hearts
The forever staggering miracle of the continued beat of our hearts.
The measure of what we name miracle, I think now, simply lies in its relative inaccessibility, in the way we tend to grasp for that which we deem rare while bypassing the riches right in front of our eyes.
The true wonder, it seems, is how often we fail to name magic or miracle that which is easily within reach.
Or maybe the real wonder is this: in every moment we are surrounded by more miracles, more highly improbable or extraordinary moments, than we can possibly fathom.
And how, when truly considered, this can’t be called anything but magic.
Blessed be.
“A miracle is often the willingness to see the common in an uncommon way.”
― Noah Benshea, Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom For a Complicated World
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