: notes to self :

miracles

i've been thinking about this post for a good part of the day, trying to work through everything that happened this weekend. it's a good exercise, attempting to understand the very extraordinary and ordinary moments in your life and see if anything changes because of them.

so here goes.








i had a good weekend. scratch that, i had a great weekend, actually.

after work on friday i had a date with my mom and together, we discovered the joys of green tea frappucinos and lamination. ah, markham =) afterwards, i waited for my sleeping boyfriend to leave his deep slumber so that we could go on a fossil-hunting expedition and maybe, just maybe, if we were lucky enough, we would find a miracle tucked away in the hollows of a great big tree. a tree with roots that were beginning to tuck themselves beneath the topsoil, a tree that had been growing for a while, waiting for us to find it.

in the meanwhile, i took my dog for a walk. remy and i hiked to the far reaches of the earth (just till the park) and blazed our own trail through overgrown and menacing brush (through the flat-top grass) and basked in the splendour of the cosmos (while watching a young boy in clean sneakers orbit his parents like a haphazard sun). we arrived home triumphant and sun-kissed, the way kids feel after a hard day conquering miraculous monkey-bar towers and scaling plastic slide palaces.

the next night, with a preface of dumplings, green tea and an "Everything" cookie (why do people use peanuts as filler? a peanut is a peanut...never a cashew, almond or pecan!), my boyfriend, his friend, our coworker and i headed to the drake to attend a poetry slam.

i don't really remember most of the poets, except for one called Rives. He's from L.A. and he was...amazing. At the end of one of his poems, "Compliment," my heart suddenly felt incredibly full and this wellspring of emotion rose like a tidal wave and came crashing down inside me as he finished. to my disbelief, tears escaped. As i tried to wipe them away quickly, AJ looked down at me, and despite the dimness, asked, incredulously, "Are you crying?" I didn't really know why I had reacted so strongly. Maybe it was because Rives was very charming. Or maybe because the poem was touching and funny. Or maybe (and maybe I knew this all along) that i felt like i had just found a small miracle, specifically a small three-and-a-half minute testament to the miracle of finding love. And maybe, just maybe, for the first time in my life, I knew that I really understood what someone was talking about. that it wasn't quite his quick-turn caesuras or his coupling couplets that made my heart swell just a little bit. that maybe it had something (or everything) to do with the tall guy, in the clothes he made me pick out for him, standing behind me.

on sunday, after we lost our softball game to the Miracles, I drove my mom to her church to attend a healing night. a pastor from malaysia, pastor jean lim, was the guest speaker, and she spoke about the power of healing and how it only comes through with complete faith. she showed us a dvd of the prayer houses in singapore, malaysia and indonesia. afterwards, she held a healing session with the attendees, and spoke and laid her hands upon each one that approached her. there was one elderly gentleman who shuffled up to the front slowly, leaning heavily on his walker and on the arm of an usher. as pastor lim spoke to him and held him firmly, she eased the walker away and seconds later, the gentleman began to walk independently. his joy was tangible and made even more apparent as he began to jog slowly around the sanctuary. after seeing this, and getting over my utter shock, i could feel the tight edges of my faith fraying and unravelling and stretching. i shouldn't have needed to see this, but i did and it was a...miracle.

a miracle.

do they actually exist? yes. do we see enough of them? we would if we looked closely. i'm going to collect miracles in mason jars, like how others keep mockingbirds, and i'll go to areas that don't got a lotta, (and areas that do) and release them into the air so that everyone can see them, even if they don't want to.