Damascus Discoveries

This weekend the baby finches that were nesting on our front porch took flight. I hadn't noticed their mother building the nest or when they took flight, only that she was there one day on her nest, suddenly she had babies, and then they were gone.

Life has been like that recently: beautiful surprises in unexpected places. Maybe it began with the transformation of our lean-to into a garden. A major step on this newly trodden path occurred this past weekend.

I went to a conference for graduate students in English. I was speaking on a panel about the profession. I was the weird one. I said it's OK to stop at the Masters degree and that maybe they should consider if they really want to commit to the academic life before going into a PhD program. I said that maybe they don't have to take every job interview if they can't see themselves living in a certain place and they have other options. I said teaching first-year students wasn't that bad. For what it was worth, ultimately they had to turn inward and know and trust themselves.

But then a high-level administrator from another college said, "interview everywhere," lie if you have to, or at least stretch the truth about how you fit into the job exactly. Along with him was a non-tenure instructor, a full-time well-published professor, and the head of a writing-tutoring program, all talking, and most complaining, while the job-hungry grad students hung on every word.

When I left the session, I realized this: my job is a good one, and my stresses are not that monumental, if I only shift my perspective in viewing them. I may not have planned to be where I am, but what a wonderful place it is, even beyond the job.

Way beyond the job.

Conversations online and over coffee, the way the sunsets paint the skyline of our otherwise unexceptional little Georgia town, a sermon that quietly surprises by building on a tiny verse, new visitations and discoveries of things I just have not been able to notice, all of these are wonders and signs. Through trust, slowing down, and really looking for and listening to the still small voice, I am re-discovering a world of beauty.

For the world online and in the news, Susan Boyle has become the embodiment of surprise, beauty in unexpected places but why? What do we expect to hear when she walks out on stage? How does she change for us and how does she change us?

At work and in life, stress and societal expectations blind us. I know they have me. It is only by stopping and connecting with what is beautiful and outsides of ourselves that the scales can fall from our eyes, and we can truly see.