Tag Archives: ordinary

flipping out the lights

ordinary-evening-header

It may be as much the ordinariness that renders an evening memorable as it is the actual memorability of it.

An evening, a cocktail, an honest confession buried in a ridiculous joke.

Ice cream, a kiddie pool, a new hip hop album with Chance the Rapper, Kirk Franklin, and somebody’s cousin named Nicole.

The fierceness of time pushed days into months at some science-fiction speed only noticed when finally cleaning the car out to discover planning notes for things long accomplished or given up on and fancy chocolate turned a new shade of cloudy.

A list of items to accomplish between the alarm and the sun’s disappearance turned into a scribbles on the back of a take-out menu from another city, also now suggesting passage through a time-warp dumping me out several months later looking around, wondering what happened and where I am.

So it seems likely, then, the ordinariness of the friends on time, and the friends on time in their lateness, that seemed to make the evening memorable.

An attempt at a fancy drink resulting in sticky counters and simple syrup on the shirt now soaking in the laundry with crystals of OxiClean I dug out of the rug where I spilled the entire container.

A pregnant friend making ice cream, testing the water out to determine it’s too cold even for you, and deciding who knew of the artist first.

ordinary-evening

The contrast of time slowed down, now with heavy eyelids a new list of scribbles that daylight tomorrow is supposed to bring, compared to a blur of months upon months where the piles in the car and the piles in the inbox stack up is stark and poignant.

No lesson to be learned. No meaning to be gleaned. Just the reality that an ordinary evening put months of blurred hustle into perspective suddenly while closing the dishwasher, turning off the music, and flipping out the lights.

thurman

djordan
Pine Tree Drive

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in the instant

Life changes in an instant, An ordinary instant, Joan Didion, Quote, New York Times Magazine, Didion, Most Hopeful, Quotes, Life, Change, Donald Jordan

Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.

Joan Didion

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challenge of the ordinary

A good, solid night’s sleep after 25 hours of travel.

Three weeks in Cape Town and all of the lead up to actually getting there, now a flash of memory.

Several restorative, sticky, thick, true memories. But still, now only a flash.

I woke up in my own bed, in my own room, in my own house: the faded curtains, the dog hair, the noise the floor boards in the attic make when they pull and push against their sixty year old nails.

I woke up back in the everyday.

And now, toward the challenge of the ordinary. The space between my toes and the scuffed old wooden floor is just as filled with possibility as the space between my sandals and the rocks of Table Mountain. The opportunity for evenings with friends telling and hearing the truth, and leaning our lives together into the kingdom are waiting to be had here just as they have been had evening after evening in the summer twilight of the Western Cape.

But the ordinary this morning threatens to push my eyelids closed, numb my senses, clog my ears making it harder to feel the possibility between my toes and this old wooden floor.

But it is pregnant with possibility. It must be.

So I’ll muster the courage stirred up in me with trusted friends and sacred spaces in Cape Town, and dare to look again for the transcendence with those trusted friends and sacred spaces here at home. I won’t struggle to make them the same; there’s no point. There’s a deep and stirring love for family in Cape Town, and it is the perfectly surprising and refreshing gift that it is.

But for right now, home is home.

And it, too, must be holy indeed. So I’ll hold out courage for the challenge.

 

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

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