Undaunted Joyਨਮੂਨਾ

Never rush to peel an orange. If someone happens to be sitting near as you break the flesh with your thumbnail, invite them to inhale the initial spray of citrus as a gift. The scent calms as it cheers.

Slowly, languidly, attempt to peel the rind in one long singular strand. Bonus points if you can take that strand and re-form it into a hollow orange. If anything, it will make you smile.

Gently gather each string of pith from the outer edges of your orange. This requires patience, but patience tastes better than haste.

Tenderly pull each segment away from the cluster. Each one is an edible jewel. When you place it in your mouth, it will explode with equal parts sweet and tart.

Once, at the Asheville airport, a group of poets invited me to share in their bounty of clementines. Each bite reminded us of poems we had stored in our memory. We took turns reading these treasured poems aloud to each other. These poems served as benedictions before we parted ways, each to a flight for a different part of the country.

In high school, each year, my English teacher read a poem about first love, sacrifice, and oranges to his incoming class. He couldn’t read the poem without his voice cracking as he struggled not to cry during the last two lines. It became an annual joke to ask the freshmen if he cried reading “Oranges,” but now I too can’t read that poem without breaking, both for the beauty of the poem and the mark left by that sweet teacher who taught us how to see, even if the lens would take us years to look through.

Today I taught a little girl who is not my own how to peel an orange. She watched with curious and expectant eyes. She was not in a hurry for her snack. She knew I was showing her more than what she could see.

Prayer

Father, please open my eyes to the beauty in your world around me, in both the big things and the small things. Amen.