Small Miracles

 I came across this observation from GK Chesterton recently: 

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. We should always endeavour to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake and wonder more at the earth. What was wonderful about childhood is that any thing in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

Shortly afterwards, I found that one of the small pots of unidentified bulbs I had bought some weeks earlier had burst into flower:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen glossier examples of crocus. I was amazed. 

But, while they could hardly be classified as the permanent thing Chesterton urges us to wonder at, they could not really be called the exception either, given crocus are ubiquitous in late winter and early spring, (one proof of this is the fact that James Marriott also mentioned crocus this week: he spotted one flowering in the wild - and the incident reminded him that Geoffrey Hill wrote a poem about crocus). 

Whichever category Chesterton would have put crocus in - permanent or exception - I think he would have agreed that mine at least - so richly purple, so radiant - are miracles in his “world full of miracles”.

For a time, the other pot I’d bought remained harder to feel any wonder at - while its companion offered a storm of shining flowers, all it could manage was this unpromising set of stalks:

But then one morning I discovered those stalks had transformed themselves into these exquisite flowers: