I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day. Like a car wreck, only with more illuminating results. I've overheard poems, virtually complete, in elevators or restaurants where I was minding my own business... When a poem does arrive, I gasp as if an apple had fallen into my hand, and give thanks for the luck involved. Poems are everywhere, but easy to miss. I know I might very well stand under that tree all day, whistling, looking off to the side, waiting for a red delicious poem to fall so I could own it forever. But like as not, it wouldn't. Instead it will fall right while I'm in the middle of changing the baby, or breaking up a rodeo event involving my children and the dog, or wiping my teary eyes while I'm chopping onions and listening to the news; then that apple will land with a thud and roll under the bed with the dust bunnies and lie there forgotten and lost for all time. There are dusty, lost poems all over my house, I assure you. In yours, too, I'd be willing to bet... I've lost so many I can't count them. I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory.
~ Barbara Kingsolver from "Stealing Apples" in SMALL WONDER
Let us become attuned to that Transcendental Being imparted to all things by divine action. It deserves our attention, and those who heed it with an open heart and with confidence and courage need not fear. For divine action has always been the source from which flows a torrent of grace which spreads over everything. Our lives flow unceasingly in that unknown deep where all that is necessary is to love and to accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in God's universal goodness.
~ from SACRAMENT OF THE PRESENT MOMENT by Jean Pierre de Caussade