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and puddle-wonderful "

e.e.cummings

When the Ordinary Meets the Extraordinary

April 2nd, 2019

Many thanks to all our guest presenters on ‘Tea with a Druid’ for Magical March: Pamela, Eimear, Julie, & Paul. We’ll have more guests for you in Mystical May!

So much has happened since 25th Feb – the last tea I had with you. The awful events in New Zealand and Mozambique. The first caused by one human being, the other by a natural disaster. All we can do in these times is help in whatever practical way we can and send our love and healing thoughts to all those who are suffering. May peace prevail.

This evening I’d like to pick up on the topic Paul brought up – the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It’s a hugely fruitful topic and, as one so drawn to the magical and extraordinary, I loved the way Paul’s repetition of the word ‘ordinary’ in the meditation led me deeper and deeper into letting go and opening up.

So how did that happen? Like many people, I guess, I have always had the following associations to ordinariness: Drab, dull, unexciting, nothing happening, ugliness even, stuckness, stasis.

‘Extraordinary’ has associated to me: exotic, exciting, different, new, weird, even ‘High Weirdness’, beauty, movement.

A heartfelt prayer of mine as a child was: “Please can my life be exciting, extra-ordinary, not drab and ordinary.”

When I held these two apparently opposite concepts together after watching Paul’s talk, something interesting happened – I felt an integration, a shift in my consciousness. They turned into two completely interrelated dynamics – of stasis and movement, of news and oldness – of innovation and tradition. All inseparable and in fact dependent on each other.

In spiritual teachings we often talk about uniting two forces within ourselves – of Yin and Yang, of the Masculine and Feminine, of Consciousness and Unconsciousness. Well, here is an apparently less exotic or esoteric pair: ordinariness and extraordinariness. But if we put them together, we get the opportunity for something special to happen: for integration, for harmony within us.

Let’s use the image of the Pheryllt in the DruidCraft Tarot to help us feel this within ourselves:

“May the ordinary and the extraordinary live in my heart forever – as lovers, as friends – so close that they are often indistinguishable from each other. In my left hand the Ordinary, in my right hand the Extraordinary. Namaste!”

2 Responses to “When the Ordinary Meets the Extraordinary”

  1. I have always, as a midwife, preferred to use the word extraordinary to describe birth. It is ‘extra’ ordinary; it happens every day all over the world. It is truly amazing….. extraordinary…..

  2. The white and the red making a lovely blushing pink of extraordinary ordinariness? 🙂 …. (if you write or read the word ordinary over a few times it turns really peculiar – perhaps there is nothing ordinary in ordinary afterall,,,

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