Twenty years ago when I first left Oregon to move to North Carolina, the first thing my friends would ask on my monthly business trips back to the West Coast was "When are you moving back?" I'd laugh, and, to their incredulity, I'd say "Never." They just couldn't imagine I could move from such a beautiful place as Oregon. There certainly were many beautiful places in Oregon. AND...North Carolina also had many beautiful spots.
When I left the Midwest for Oregon in my twenties, friends there also questioned my sanity when I left "God's Country," the name many Hoosiers call Indiana. There were many beautiful places in Indiana and Ohio, where I'd lived during two college years.
I've driven across the United States several times and on each trip I've discovered beauty in almost every state. In trips abroad I've found beauty in many spots there as well. Despite what my friends in Indiana might believe, if God created special places of beauty, he/she was most generous with them.
I am writing most of this post in Wilmington, Delaware, where I've just spent a lovely day. The gem in the crown of this city is certainly the riverfront, and as I think of beautiful places I've visited, they've often had focal points of water.
Wilmington's Riverfront includes several aspects of others in one setting. It is beautifully landscaped along a wide brick and concrete path, which is actively used by runners, walkers, and cyclists. Yesterday I took the water taxi from one end of the city to the other and back again. Like San Antonio, Wilmington's riverfront hosts several restaurants which were packed and bubbled forth with music and laughter...and cheers for World Cup goals from one. Crewers rowed their skulls along the river.
Wilmington also hosts some bits of human history. Harriett Tubman had led over 700 slaves to freedom using her Underground Railroad which ended in Wilmington. During World War II, Wilmington fostered freedom in a different way: it was the largest producer of US Navy ships in the country. What had once been shipyards now hosts the Riverfront path I have walked several times since arriving.
One of the unique characteristics here, though is the "urban wildlife preserve." Behind meticulously tended landscapes are wilder sanctuaries throughout, culminating in several hundred acres of preserved marshland at the end of development.
As I've reflected on this and lots of other places of beauty, I started to use the word "extraordinary," but "extraordinary" implies out of the ordinary. Beautiful places so abound in our world that they are not out of the ordinary. Perhaps that is a problem. We've become so accustomed to the beauty around us that it has become ordinary, when it should quite rightly be remarkable. The brooks and streams, wild flowers, trees, and every other creation ought to take our breath away...daily, even hourly. Sadly, most of the time it passes unnoticed.
If we would just notice what is working, we might also notice people cooperating and collaborating. Ever notice when someone is attempting to open a door with their hands full (and sometimes when they aren't) that another person often opens the door. Or, ask for directions in a public place, and several people within earshot will add pieces. Comedian Jon Stewart once described that we know how to cooperate by explaining that cars making their way onto a freeway alternate methodically without direction. The way that we cooperate and collaborate is a thing of beauty, which we seem to ignore until it stops working.
I've written about gratitude many times in this blog, but today I am wondering what it would be like if we all noticed both the natural beauty around us and the generally cooperative spirit of humanity. Maybe that is where the gratitude journaling helps: it forces us to sit and remember things of beauty--natural and human--around us. But, I think real magic might happen if we focused our intention on noticing beauty in the moment...oh, what a beautiful world it could be.
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