Waking to the scent of coffee brewing, of mixing the sugar and milk and slowly savoring the first sip.
Spotting the first skunk cabbage, hepatica, twin leaf in the still barren, brown and cold winter woods, witnessing signs of the coming warmth while bundled in my winter coat and scarf.
Late afternoon light in the woods.
The way the air shifts and changes on a walk, warm in the open meadow and like a smooth cold stone on my cheek in the shade by a stream.
Knowing when and where to expect the moon, following its phases.
Molly, my dog, her innocence, her purity, her joy in just being, her renewed excitement over the same things again and again, dancing in circles in anticipation of the same meal that she eats every single day.
Sinking into a book when I know I am reading just the right thing at just the right time.
Noticing what seems to be insignificant – a tiny mushroom growing from a fallen branch, the odd ice formations on the bank of a creek, the delicate little bloom peeking from the leaf litter or amongst the refuse of the ditch.
Witnessing the sparsely abundant growth of spring, when the once delicate and unsure little seedlings just begin to burst with the confidence of survival.
The first bite of cold watermelon on a sultry summer day.

Some weeds remind me not to neglect the beauty of the commonplace and wonder in the ordinary. If a dandelion were rare, we would marvel at it. That bright yellow bloom and amazing seed pod. Children know this wonder. Some weeds remind me to retain the wonder of childhood when my heart leapt up at the sight of a dandelion and I was drawn to them and chased after their delicate seeds dancing on the wind, when I held buttercups under my chin and collected clover blooms and tied them into bracelets and crowns. They weren’t “weeds” to me then. They were marvels and mediums for creation, imagination, exploration. George Eliot said that we never could have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it. And I believe that’s true. The key is to somehow keep that connection alive as we grow older.

Some weeds also remind me to always look for the flower in the ditch, as it were. Flowers like chicory, mullein, and fleabanes that grow in the dry, dim, and dismal places, where it seems that nothing else would grow. There is beauty even there.

Everything expands.

To share one of my own small experiences in this regard, in 2017 I started hiking regularly. It’s something I had always loved to do but rarely got the chance and suddenly I had the opportunity to do it more frequently. One April day, I decided to take a break and have my lunch by a stream just a few feet off the trail. I took off my back pack and was about to set it down when my eyes caught a flash of yellow. I looked closer and when I got down on my hands and knees I realized that yellow speck was a tiny but very unusual flower (what I now know is a trout lily – erythronium americanum). I could not believe that something was already growing – and blooming! – in the otherwise brown, barren expanse of woods. Suddenly I started to look around, except now I was looking down instead of up, and I found that there were actually flowers EVERYWHERE. Tiny white, pale pink, and purple blooms peeking through the leaf litter. Though I had been out hiking all day, I hadn’t seen them. But that one little yellow bloom shifted my focus. Instead of looking out over the expanse of woods or waiting for the grand views, my attention was now on the forest floor, where unbeknownst to me before there was so much life and color. Spring beauty, hepatica, anemones – the spring ephemerals. I didn’t know any of their names at the time, but after that experience I became determined to name and know as many local, native wildflowers that I could. I suddenly saw what I thought was just an expanse of bare trees and dead leaves in a whole new light.

The first part of my day is devoted to obligations and chores, but as I move through them I reflect on the benefits of having them done. For the past three days I’ve spent afternoons/evenings on my hands and knees working in my garden. Today rain. Now it is time to watch and wait to see what will happen, what will thrive and what will need to be re-thought. Now that my yard labor is done (for the moment), this afternoon I will walk. Though it might be a soggy one, I look forward to observing the wet woods, maybe looking for some fungi to photograph.

In a strange juxtaposition, I’ve found that some of the most painful times of my life have brought with them a heightened sense of beauty. It wasn’t something that I actively or consciously sought, but along with the despair, all of my senses became elevated, like I acquired a hyper-sensitivity to the beauty of a single moment. I can’t adequately explain it, and it didn’t last, except in memory. It’s just a sense and depth of beauty that I’ve never experienced in times of ease.

I love this question as books have meant so much to me, have transported me and helped me to escape while simultaneously grounding me and and helped me grapple with the Stuff of Life.

I’m grateful for the childhood/adolescent books that showed me what empathy is and how to inhabit the experience of another – books like The Lottery Rose and Where the Red Fern Grows, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

I’m grateful for the books that embarked my adult reading path after a long hiatus. The books that helped me remember a love of reading : Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (in which I found my “first love” in classic literature – Thomas Hardy).

Today’s question reminds me of a quote from one of Emily Dickinson’s letters, “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

What has helped me is to establish habits and practices, rituals if you will, that keep me grounded in the present moment. Noting the phases of the moon, hunting the wildflowers each season, growing things from seed, learning to identify (give attention to) the birds that frequent my backyard.

When I go about my daily routine, when I walk the same daily path again and again, I try and approach it with the mindset that within what seems like the very familiar, there is something new that can be discovered. Each moment is wholly unique in some way, each sunset or snowfall or summer thunderstorm, is something that will never appear or happen in quite the same way ever again. That adds a sense of novelty and possibility to the everyday, to the mundane.

As someone who is okay spending a lot of time alone and having a few rather than many connections, less social gathering left me feeling calmer and less anxious, more myself.

Not being able to dash to the store every time I think of something I need has made me better at making do with what I have, stretching ingredients to last longer, and making sure I use up or freeze/preserve things rather than letting them waste away in the refrigerator. Thereby, it revealed to me how much I had been wasting.

Walking the same few paths again and again close to my home rather than traveling for hikes and excursions revealed how much there is to notice right at my fingertips. I like to hunt for wildflowers, especially the spring ephemerals, and I found so many growing in a little patch of woods near my house – rue and wood anemones, bloodroot, cutleaf toothwort, putty root orchid. These are, of course, common forest flowers, but while I always notice them and even seek them out on hikes, I realized that I’d overlooked them on the everyday paths closest to my home.