I'm on the lookout for small miracles and find there are plenty around, just waiting to be found. Take this tiny white flower; it's no more than 6mm across in any direction
and these haloed grass heads, flowering in their gazillions down near the harbour's edge.
These Katherine Wheel seed heads belong to what I think is a Virginia creeper sprawling exuberantly across the sidewalk just below my house
and these micro-magnets arrived in yesterday's mail. . . magnets are a miracle any day of the week, but these are exquisite! A kind-sounding man named Gordon from dangerousmagnets.co.nz sent them to me to trial with my boats. I have to find an invisible way to mount the flotilla to the gallery wall and thought magnets might do the trick. These are much tinier than I'd imagined, despite being given the diameter measurements over the phone. Would you believe there are 23 magnets in this tiny wee stack?!
They're remarkably strong (they'd think nothing of taking possession of my hefty bunch of keys were I to inch them a tiny bit closer). Separating the key head from the magnets with a match calms the energy field down a bit. . .
This afternoon I recalled another small miracle that happened a little while ago and that still makes me smile. I was in Tasmania at the time. Apparently cowries are a rare-if-at-all find on Tasmanian beaches. I was reminiscing about my childhood in Africa where I'd spent hours and hours searching for baby cowries on the South Coast beaches. I had just spoken the last few lines of my Give Me Thunder poem out loud to my friend Rupert - 'give me white-ribbed cowries, an amber ball to roll beneath my feet, down to sand and salt water's edge. . . '- when I looked down and there one was sitting between my feet; on a coastline almost entirely barren of shells. But that isn't all. Unbeknown to me, a friend on the other side of the world had spotted a lone cowrie on the ocean floor in Florida, USA. We had not spoken to each other for over a year; a plain manilla envelope arrived in the mail a week or so after I returned home; inside, a small cowrie sellotaped to a piece of white card.
Look out for small miracles. . . and may they find you, if you don't find them first.
