Positively Newsworthy: The Little Things is an addition to the Positively Newsworthy section of our magazine. In The Little Things, our editors share positive thoughts, reflections, and everyday moments of gratitude and hope that have uplifted them each season. Read their Autumn 2020 offerings below!
Perhaps You Didn’t See it
by Aisling Cronin
Perhaps you didn’t see it:
How they flew above you
And turned circles of hope –
Their feathers traced out
a pattern you once understood.
Perhaps you didn’t hear it:
The whoosh of their wings
Making way for a fresher breeze.
Listen now.
Feel the stirrings of solace
The whisperings of a heart unclosed
The softening steps of a soul at ease.
Breathe in your new story when it next arrives
Carried by the songs of a distant bird.
Celebrating Good Humans
Reaching beyond ‘me and mine’
by Alison McEvoy
I always knew my mum was a very special person. Confirmation wasn’t needed, but I got it anyway. About eight months ago, after the birth of my baby boy, I was thrown in the deep end – and she jumped in after me. Every single day she makes her way to us and throws herself into tending, minding, feeding, cleaning and shopping. Never mind that she’s done it all before and that, theoretically at least, these are her harvest days – the days when she should be basking in the sun after the hard work of her life.
She loves to take babs out for his evening walk. On these walks she has gotten to know the neighbourhood in a way only the Parish Priest would. She meets mums and babies, older men and women, as she circles about the church lane and picks the hot spots to have a sit in. She listens to the stories, the hardships mainly, of these passers-by. I know she also holds them in her prayers at night.
Last week she asked me to buy a gift for the child of a couple she meets. They can only afford second hand clothes for their little one, struggling as they are to pay huge rents. I continuously marvel at her ability, no, her willingness, to care. To think and reach and offer out beyond her circle of ‘me and mine’. She has the eyes of a mystic I believe. Her soul lies in the long grass Rumi talks of, the place “out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,’ where “the world is too full to talk about” and “even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”
