"All is a miracle" - Thich Nhat Hanh

I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child--our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

-Thich Nhat Hanh, "Miracle of Mindfulness"

From "365 Buddha: Daily Meditations," edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

To these everyday miracles, I would like to add a few of my own (nonexhaustive list of course):

1. Hot coffee (sounds pretty micro, but when I heard it first revered in woman Thornton Wilder's Our Town, by a young woman who had died and was naming the aspects of life that she had not appreciated nearly enough while she was alive to enjoy them....and it resonated so much with me that I think of it often as I sip my own)

2. Birth - where does the spark actually come from? When I was a brand new mom, I had a photo album on which was printed, "Where do you come from baby dear....out of the everywhere into the here...", and I would look at my tiny little baby boy with his giant blue eyes and his perfect lips and his velvet skin, and I would just weep.

3. Love - the fact that two people who fit together can actually find each other and be together

4. Medical Science - How cures for any disease were discovered, how vaccines were isolated...the process is something I can never hope to understand but am thankful for every day.

5. Flight - the defiance of gravity by birds AND by man-made aircrafts, from space ships, all the way down to paper airplanes. Amazing stuff.

6. Evolution - you see it every day with the new breeds of dogs...so what they all are being bred from poodles. It is still might instructive about how species evolve through the millenia.

7. Technology - who could imagine? It sounds like a cliche, but imagine going to sleep in 1940, and waking up today, walking out onto the sidewalk somewhere in the middle of New York City and seeing people talking into tiny little rectangular shaped pieces of metal or seeing seemingly non-psychotic people seemingly talking to themselves (with a wire hanging down from their ear...or maybe not, thanks to Bluetooth)...seeing people typing into tiny little devices or keyboards that don't plug into the wall. Seeing the tall buildings made almost entirely of glass. Seeing the billboards in Times Square with their live feeds. Seeing what appeared to be framed artwork on the wall coming to life as a television. Cable TV. Paris Hilton. The Gastineau Girls. But I digress, as these are not technology but seem only to exist through the medium of technology....

YC