The Rests Between the Notes

quo·tid·i·an

/kwōˈtidēən/

adjective

1. of or occurring every day; daily.

o ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane.

 

These are those days. Ordinary.  Mundane.  

Outside the chores are reduced to chicken feed and water.  It is simple work – almost rhythmic – with, as the word suggests, a common dailyness that lends the morning hours the faintest hint of structure.  There is an occasional egg to collect, or two.  Otherwise, ordinariness is the norm.

Inside, yes, there is decorating to do for the holidays – among my favorite days of the year.  Carols in the background, tree lights and treasured ornaments in the foreground.  Christmas cookies iced with memories along with the sprinkles.  But the festivization of the living spaces will be accomplished soon enough, and the oven will return to commoner baking.   

Which is not to bemoan these quotidian days – inside or out. To call them “ordinary” or “mundane” is not to mock or malign them.  There is something replenishing about the plod of the days; centering.   I think back to the wise insight a mentor once offered a youthful me:  “If every moment were a mountaintop experience your body couldn’t handle the electricity.” 

I’m grateful for those mountaintop exhilarations, whenever they occasionally occur, but I’m equally grateful for these slower, ordinary, pedestrian ones.   

Music needs rests to elevate the notes.

Gardens need fallow seasons else fertility declines.

As we need the mundanity of days.  

Feeding and watering outside.  Washing and laundering, sorting and discarding inside.  And reading – replenishing the soil of mind and soul.  Patient chronos, preparing space for kairos.  Snow is finally in the extended forecast – three consecutive days next week.  If it falls and if it blankets the ground the pace will dial down even more.  Meanwhile, the clock ticks, the heart beats, the sun rises and, soon enough, sets.    Sleep, and then rising yet again.    

Metronoming the simpler rhythms of these quotidian days.