There Is No Ordinary

It’s a very strange thing, when you consider it, that sleeping or waking, you exist on an immense globe of atmosphere-wreathed rock hurtling through space.

What we call “rock'”or “dirt,” the very stuff of Earth, is in comparison with the rest of the universe far more precious and rare than emeralds, pearls, or lapis lazuli.

And the things we ourselves make can be as uncanny as the rest.

Stranger still, there’s beauty everywhere, lavished by the powers over the natural and sometimes the artificial.

Updike wrote his novel, The Centaur, he once said, “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

These photographs came quietly and directly from ordinary life. “Kallos” depicts a candy bowl, while I took “Crow—August Morning” during a bike ride. “Gold-Beige Layers” reveals water-like patterns in a marble window sill.

Curtains in a bedroom, cloth grocery bags, a revetted city creek, a highway underpass: What strange beauty, what radiance we sometimes see, when the most unremarkable things reveal themselves, burning with sanctity.

There is no ordinary.