“Something is calling to me/ from the corners of fields,/ where the leftover fence wire/ suns its loose coils…”

Ah, the power of the ordinary! Ted Kooser is one of the best at capturing that power. The above is from his “In the Corners of Fields.” It has been said of him that he draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life, that the everyday objects he places in his poems as images reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.

Here, the simplicity—of the language, the images, and the most immediate meaning—belies the extraordinary nature of the poem, its exquisite culling down of life’s multiple dimensions. Not long ago I was at Hallmark corp. and had a chance to hear Ted Kooser. Ted is the poet laureate of the United states… and, you know the thing is you can read a book but…it is the things that are said from within personal relationships that matter… ..

As I think about it, so many of the great works of art, literature, and culture have been seemingly ordinary. Maybe it’s because when we see or read or hear something ordinary framed as a work of art—be it story, picture, or song—we are startled into recognizing its significance. Ordinary in art strikes a chord of wistfulness and remembrance, perhaps. It forces us to stop—and wonder at all we’ve ignored, the things we’ve missed, what we’ve overlooked or forgotten.

When we walk through an ordinary garden, we can absorb inspiration from the daisies and butterflies, the roses and dragonflies… a hike through the woods gives us creeks and frogs, ferns and fallen logs. What do you notice walking or driving down the road? Are you noticing anything, or are you too busy balancing your Starbucks while dialing your cell phone? Hang up and look around; at least smell and taste that coffee. Or sit down and truly listen to your friend on the other line—the tone and timbre of his voice, how she strings her words together, the quirky little colloquialisms.

Such worldly inspiration leads to the best, the richest, and the most superlative beauty, which can neither be seen nor touched … but is felt in the heart. Georgia O’Keefe imagined, “I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

Ultimately, your are going to realize in your own work… that Your best work is going to come from your own best stories, and for those stories to actually be their best, you’re going to have to really pay attention to your lives— your ordinary lives.

I just finished Daniel Libeskind’s book Breaking Ground and I particularly enjoyed the revelation of how he designs— because his work is inspired by the Ordinary… “How do I design? People often ask me that, and I’m not quite sure how to answer, because my approach is less than orthodox, and even I don’t always understand the process. Sometimes my thoughts are triggered by a piece of music or a poem, or simply by the way light falls on a wall. Sometimes the idea comes to me from the light deep in my heart. I don’t focus on what the design will look like, I focus what it will feel like, and as I do my mind becomes cluttered with a kaleidoscope of colloquial images from my past.”

As well, his philosophy speaks to the passion of a soul and, then, isn’t it amazing how Libeskind can be so passionate in the work he does and how it comes from “a light deep in his heart”… He says, “I am not embarrassed by the nakedness of my emotions.”…

He sees the world as progress, alive, an adventure. How appropriate his title, Breaking Ground. His philosophy is built on a passage found in Hebrews: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Isn’t this thinking, this passion, amazing, and moreover how he shares it?!

Remember the Allegory of the Cave? I’m going to condense it obscenely here, because it’s a little too long in its entirety, but in Plato’s story, people are in a cave, chained to a wall and watching shadows cast on the back wall of the cave, and this is their whole life. Behind them is a raised walkway on which people walk carrying statues of dogs and tables and mountains, and books and trees and everything else in the world. Behind those people with their statues is a fire whose light casts shadows of the statues onto the wall.

So what the people are actually seeing are shadows—of statues—of things. That is, what they are seeing is something several removes from the real, namely an image of an image of a real thing. But it’s all they know; this is their reality. How many times do we do this to ourselves—limit our reality by failing to look, by not turning our heads? Okay, to tie this into the Libeskind idea, and his quote about faith—Is it reasonable to presume that one of the reasons we can possess faith at all is that the ordinary things we witness every day feed our conviction that there is more to know?

Even something as seemingly plain as a snowflake, as we all know, is not as simple as it looks. In his book, What Shape is a Snowflake, mathematician Ian Stewart asserts that no two objects in the universe are the same if you look closely enough. As for snowflakes themselves: “If you accept only those differences that are visible under a low-powered lense, …and if my eye can distinguish a hundred tiny features, and each can be present or not, that makes a nonillion—a million trillion trillion—different snowflake shapes.”

I swear, I think about all of this every time I have to call on my knowledge of the ordinary to allow me to comprehend the extraordinary things being discovered all the time: giant sea worms that grow up to eight feet long, monster squids that weigh a ton, massive oceans under the ice on Jupiter’s moons…And did any of you see March of the Penguins? The conditions those penguins endure to incubate the eggs (the FATHERS, not the mothers!)…

But I couldn’t talk to you about ‘ordinary’ without bringing it home to what you do—being creatives—and where extraordinary and ordinary can intersect most crucially in your creative, professional lives. Each of you—each of US—has to find our own way to make this happen, but I’m reminded of Oscar Niemeyer and his Brasilia, which I talked about last time—his mulling over his own good fortune: “…you invent a city, and then you can have a drink in a bar in your city, the most ordinary thing.”

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