Trap of The Common Place

“What are those pretty birds?” – Nelson Brill

Trap of The Common Place

The land fell to meet the water quite abruptly.  Pine trees coated the canyon sides right down to where huge rocks clung to the sides of a cliff.  The Snake River was rushing below it all!  It was breath taking.  Perhaps that’s one reason I was so surprised when Nelson began to ask me about another beautiful sight.

“What are those pretty birds?” He asked.

Nelson Brill, one of my school friends from Scarsdale, New York had never ventured out west.  That’s why we were on this little trip together.  He was seeing lots of things he had never seen before.  And, that’s sort of the way it was for me as well.  You see, he kept pointing out things like the birds he was asking about.  Things I was taking in as, simply “common” and not significant.

“What birds are you talking about?” I responded in a truly curious tone.

“The black and white ones.”  He answered.

“The black and white ones!”  I thought and thought.  What could he be possibly be referring to?  I was stumped!

“Next time you see one please point it out to me.”  I said, truly clueless!

Not long afterward Nelson pointed to one of the birds I had been too blind to see.

“There’s one right there!  It is so beautiful!”  Nelson called out.

My eyes followed the sight line of his finger so I could see this magnificent bird, perhaps for the first time.  I saw it for sure, but not for the first time.  It was a common magpie!

“Oh!  Those birds!”  I said.

Yet, perhaps I was really seeing them for the first time, this time through Nelson’s eyes.  They were beautiful indeed!  I had simply been blind to their beauty up to now because I had fallen into the “Trap of The Common Place!”

The trap of The Common Place is something all of us encounter from time to time during our lives.  And, perhaps some of us are never free of its numbing effects.  After all, a person held tightly within this trap’s grip lives in a world projected as if by an old, square black and white television set which lacks scope, depth and color.  They fail to see the vivid colors and depth of field offered to everyone who takes the time to look and really see the world as it really is, as Sarah Wood reminded me again earlier this week.

“Wow!”  She said.  “Look at that tumble weed roll!  But, I guess you see those all the time?!”

“I do often see tumble weeds roll along!”  I said to myself.  And, “They are quite magnificent!”  I said once again to myself as I looked through Sarah’s eyes at my common place, which also caused my mind to shift in time to when I first recognized I was living in the Trap of The Common Place.

My mind tumbled to where the land fell to meet the water quite abruptly.  Pine trees coated the canyon sides right down to where huge rocks clung to the sides of a cliff.  The Snake River was rushing below it all.  It was breath taking.  Perhaps that’s one reason I was so surprised when Nelson began to ask me about another beautiful sight.  Those magnificent, common place, black and white birds!