The Way We See Things

In my kitchen, at this very moment, there are a dozen very brown bananas.  Very stinky very brown bananas.  I can smell them even here down the hall in my office.  Those bananas want tending to, and the scent reminds me that I had best be quick about it.  They are about to become banana bread with lots of added ginger.  It will be lovely to have several loaves in the freezer just waiting to be warmed later at leisure and eaten with cream cheese for teatime. 

But, for whatever reason, here I sit at my desk thinking of now, instead of the future as I should be doing.  And maybe for no particular reason at all, I am ruminating on the shapes and colors of my desk shelves and the way the light shines on things in front of me.  Sometimes inconsequential things call us to look at them, to consider them, to see the beauty of the ordinary, and to think what a wonder it is that so many different things come together in the ways that they do. 

I don't know why the desk has put me in mind of Richard Wilbur's poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" but it has.  It is a poem that I used to explicate with my students when I was, once upon a time for a few too-short years, teaching college freshmen--an island in time that I wish I could visit again, when the world was full of wonder instead of stinky brown bananas.

.....The morning air is all awash with angels.....

Life is good.  
And it's generally kinda amazing, too.
Those bananas will just have to wait another few minutes.