Just Be Ordinary

Stairway into the Columbia River.

In my shamanic training I learned about three spheres of our universe. There is a upper world which is a realm with the ascended ancestors and light beings. There is a lower world, with the animals, humbling beauty and echos of earth. And there is this place that we live. My teachers called it the Ordinary World. This middle place is our home right now. I learned how it is mixed and stirred with spirits and elements and people and all beings. I always thought it ironic and humorous to call our world ordinary. Ordinary? Yeah, right. It's the most amazing place of all.

Walt Whitman said "I know nothing but miracles." When you really witness the creation here, really let the terrible beauty settle in, how can we not think we're in a miracle? Yet there is pain here and loss and misunderstanding. There feels like a brooding dark glass over our vision of what is real and lasting. Maybe moments outside of the brooding and homeless feeling can be found in the ordinary. Right here.

Remember the questions my counselor asked me to consider when I feel lost? Where are you? and What are you doing? I have many pat and scintillating answers. Like: We are spiritual beings living our lives in physical form. Or, I'm growing and evolving with a richer experience as a person. Maybe these are true answers. Yet I wonder if much of my life is spent in a landscape of metaphor. Where everything has to be compared with something else or an ideal.

What my counselor said after I came back with few well chosen answers was this: "Rick, just be ordinary!" Puleeze... just be here with what is. Be right here, in your own body.

OK. I'm sitting in the early gloaming of Sunday evening. The kids and neighbors are playing and laughing just outside the door. I'm at my desk seeing the bright white screen with a hundred trees in the mist around my windows. I am in my body and I am musing to my friends and fellow human beings on the web. I press Send... and I'm on to the next experience.

Just be ordinary! Ordinary? This experience is a miracle!


Is this experience of our life only a reflection of something greater?

Are we sufficient just as we are?

Is this simple breath, in and out, really ordinary?

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