After sitting zazen this morning, I was draped across my favorite chair, somewhat noisily slurping a coffee when I became mesmerized by the light falling across the leaves of this pot plant.

After watching this sort of phosphorescence of clarity slowly move across it for who-knows-how-long, I fetched my camera and tried to capture the moment. Of course, this photo is not that moment, it is another one. The light had faded, my mood had shifted, the attention was on the camera, not the thing.

But it does hint at the calling beauty of ordinary things when listened to.

Numinous (/ˈnjuːmɪnəs/) means “arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring”; also “supernatural” or “appealing to the aesthetic sensibility.” The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy. He also used the phrase mysterium tremendum as another description for the phenomenon.

Wikipedia

This sort of stuff is all around us, always accessible and greatly undervalued. As some random guy on the internet says, “you don’t gotta pay much….you just gotta pay attention.”