On Rock Hunting and Not Looking for Anything In Particular

Rock-hunting on the shores of Lake Michigan occupies a fair amount of my time each summer. With pails, buckets, strainers, and sifters, I set forth on the search. And I set out again and again, day after day, summer after summer, never tiring of this search.

I started thinking about my fondness for rock-hunting while re-reading Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture and  In Tune with the World. How, and why, was I still so fond of such a futile activity? Hours and hours of time in exchange for rocks, the majority of which are still sitting in the buckets I used to collect them.

Pieper notes that the world of leisure (also the world of festivity) is outside the realm of utility and calculation; he says that it transcends the workaday world. What does this mean, exactly? It means that during experiences of true leisure, we stop thinking along the lines of “I have to do this because...” or “I need to do this so that...” and just settle into being. It means that we lose track of time. It means that we are spending our time in a way that is not useful or convenient. We are not ‘at leisure’ for the sake of anything else.

Leisure is just good in and of itself; in this sense, it is futile. In addition, Pieper says it is time that we cannot earn through hard work or deserve through superb diligence. It is always a gift that we receive (Leisure the Basis of Culture, 62).

My earliest experiences as a rock-hunter had some of the characteristics of true leisure. I started rock-hunting because I heard a story about a special kind of rock that could be found on the northern shores of Lake Michigan and I had seen these rocks in the many gift shops that lined the streets of the small lakeside towns. The rocks were called Petoskey Stones; and legend had it that the stone was named after the Indian Chief Petosagay; the sun had shined on his face when he was born and his face beamed with a radiance. The chalky white sunburst pattern that covers the grey surface of the Petoskey Stone is easy to see when wet; but, when the stone is dry, it looks like an ordinary, gray rock. Intrigued by the story, I wanted to find one of my own.

One way to find these rocks is to ask the locals who regularly hunt for the stones what beaches they have recently scoured with success. But even with that information, there is no guarantee that you will find a stone on a particular day. If it’s overcast, the rocks’ pattern becomes hard to see even in the water. Sometimes the waves caused by a windy thunderstorm will toss buckets of the stones up onto the shore. Sometimes the waves will gather the stones back into deeper water. The texture, color, and shape of the rocky beach surface can vary slightly by the day, and dramatically by the year. So, finding a Petoskey stone is largely a matter of luck. It is something you almost have to receive. And if you asked me why, when I initially started to rock-hunt, I rock-hunted I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I didn’t do anything with them once I had placed them in a jar, except look at them. I didn’t make jewelry out of them. I didn’t even polish them. My rock-hunting was pointless.

Nowadays, my rock hunting is even more futile than that. I no longer rock-hunt for rocks. And, I think that Pieper would say that this is for the better because I am more ‘at leisure.’ Ultimately to be at leisure, he says, means to contemplate, and to contemplate means “to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us... without calling for any effort or strain on our part to possess them” (Leisure 27). I wanted to limit my vision to a particular kind of stone and did undertake efforts so that I could collect, in other words possess, them. For Pieper, such love is too limited for true leisure. True leisure requires receptivity and receptivity, great generosity. He explains that once we have received the things that have offered themselves to our sight, we respond with joy, with an affirmation of reality, saying, “everything that is is good, and it is good to exist...For man cannot have the experience of receiving what is loved, unless the world and existence as a whole represent something good and therefore beloved to him” (In Tune with the World 26).

I started out with the desire to scour all the beaches I could make it to in order to find Petoskey stones and would alas, feel a tinge of disappointment when the day had not rewarded my efforts. Now, my summer rock-hunting looks more like taking a leisurely stroll along the beach. Sure, I still look down on the shore. Sure, I still enjoy finding them. But, I appreciate more all the other things that come into my view along the way: other kinds of rocks that I have come to learn about – Leelanau blue (a beautiful cobalt or aquamarine blue stone), quartz, chert, smooth pieces of beach glass… there are things even beyond the rocks I set out to find and enjoy finding---the marvelous palette of color along the shore, the soft lapping of the waves and their seemingly endless stretch into the distance, the wild, messy foliage stretching up sandy hills into a forest behind, the soft and knotty pieces of driftwood that toss up with the waves, the conversation of friends and family pacing along with me, or the breathtaking quiet of it all... I went from asking, ‘What can I find?’ and ‘How can I get what I’m looking for?’ to ‘What is here for me to see? and ‘I know there will be something good waiting there...I wonder what it will be.’

The act of not-looking-for-anything-in-particular allows for a more expansive love.

If we are going to truly be at leisure, we cannot set out to look for anything in particular and we cannot set out with a desire to acquire, accumulate, or possess. But, we can and should still set out, resting in the knowledge that what awaits, although we are not sure what it is, is surely going to be good.

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Colleen Coleman

is from Michigan but is still learning how to survive the winters in Minnesota. Admiring birch trees and ferns, talking with friends over tea, writing letters, making music, rock-hunting on Lake Michigan, book browsing (and reading), and cooking are a few of her favorite things. What is she hoping to learn in the near future? How to make kombucha and how to acquire a green thumb. She lives in St. Paul and teaches at a private school.

The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher in Defense of Civilization

Mr. Jeremy Fisher is a frog with a diverse set of friends which includes Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise and Sir Isaac Newton, who is a newt. Mr. Jeremy Fisher lives in leisure in “a little damp house” by the edge of a pond. One day his fancy strikes him to catch fish, and being a sporting toad, he challenges himself: if I catch more than five minnows, I will invite my friends The Alderman and Sir Isaac Newton over for dinner. 

The day does not go as planned, however—though, as we will see, it ends as expected, with a merry repast with friends in Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s little damp house. 

First, the fish won’t bite and it is raining. Then, a giant water beetle nibbles Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s toes. Then, he hears a rustling in the grass and suspects a rat is nearby, so he is forced to move. Things are looking up when he feels the telltale tug on the line, but up he pulls not a minnow but a spiny stickleback, which cuts Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s fingers and wriggles around on Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s lily pad, “pricking and snapping until he was quite out of breath.” 

The blood on his fingers still wet, the stickleback’s pricks still store, and the minnows’ mocking laughter ringing in his ears, things go from the frying pan of pain to the fire of mortal peril when an enormous trout stealthily surfaces and swallows Mr. Jeremy Fisher whole.

This is not the end of Mr. Jeremy Fisher however, and we know this before we even get to the happy ending, because Beatrix Potter soothes our nerves by explaining that this latest peril would have been “a really frightful thing…if Mr. Jeremy Fisher had not been wearing a macintosh.” 

A “macintosh” [sic] is a raincoat, more commonly called a Macintosh or Mackintosh. Scotsman Charles Macintosh invented a method of waterproofing cotton fabric with rubber in the early 19th century, sold his first rubberized cotton coat in 1824, and transformed British outerwear forever. Beware imitations. You can still find the genuine article.

The trout could not abide the taste of the macintosh. The otherwise delectable frog, armed with his macintosh, was a frog set apart, not merely a frog but Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a frog with a name, invulnerable to the slings and arrows of those impersonal powers of nature which swim without proper names: trout, stickleback, minnow. With this garment of industry Mr. Jeremy Fisher wrenched open a link in the food chain which had him, and would have had him forever, subject to the stealthy predation of submarine foes. 

The trout “spat him out again.” Jonah, we are told, spent three days in the belly of the great fish before he was rescued by God. Mr. Jeremy Fisher by contrast spent just “half a minute” in the belly of his fish before he was rescued by his macintosh. 

Mr. Jeremy Fisher made his way home. His friends joined him that evening for supper. Sir Isaac Newton wore his black and gold waistcoat, and Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise brought a salad. They dined on the salad and a roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce. The macintosh was in tatters after his encounter with the trout, but not Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s nerves, or his commitment to dining with friends. For technology, such as a macintosh, is the frame but not the picture, the soil but not the flower, of civilization. 

(The article was previously published here, February 2019.)

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Thomas M. Ward is assistant professor of philosophy at Baylor University. He sometimes blogs at www.thomasmward.com.

In Defense of Looking into Puddles

“Look up!”

This wide spread message encourages us to stop plodding through life and gaze above us, looking for the wonders and beauty of the world. This also may be a passive aggressive way of telling people to stop texting and walking at the same time. In any case, there are people who desire to pull others from their own individualized realities and expand their worlds to see what is greater than themselves and their own achievements.

However, the limitless range of seeming impossibilities can become a hopeless and daunting view.

Our own needs, our own goals, and everything else that forms our own personal horizon are so ingrained in us that we need to keep most of it intact. Not to say that looking up every once and a while will shatter our life but the vast world beyond our own is a lot to look at and examine. Looking up to something greater than yourself and your world, struggling through lofty ideas, and striving towards high-mindedness pulls you away from simple jokes and causes you to disdain frivolity, perhaps even to the point of missing out on the little joys of silliness.

The greatness we should aspire to is not always palatable. We are small creatures with potential, it takes a while for our eyes to become adjusted to this glinting glory of the world above us. When looking up, you will also doubtlessly see all those who look down upon you, frowning on your bewilderment at trying to comprehend the expanse of reality. Again, a helpful but discouraging sight.

Lest the boundless grandeur of the sky be forever out of reach, I propose we find ways to see more of the world when we look down into our own worlds. The worlds we have already built and are already familiar with. Let us open the portals from our personal worlds into the majesty of reality and potential.

I wish to spread my own command: “Look into puddles”.

Every puddle can become a small world. We can see it all with one glance, or simply ignore it, but perhaps we stop to look at our reflection and maybe even a little more of what is there other than ourselves. It is a looking glass through the new blurry eyes of nature that gives us a window from our own small worlds into a bit of the wonders and beauty accessible to every person who happens upon it.

If you are looking out for these reflecting pools, you my also see things below you that would have otherwise been missed. Perhaps you take notice of the clean edges of grass along a well-kept lawn, or the occasional interesting set of cracks in the pavement. You may also see worms in the puddles, which are rather fascinating. Going out for a walk in the springtime, “the puddle hunting season”, there are many such chances to throw yourself into thinking or to simply admire the fuzzy person that looks back at you. I wonder if nature laughs at our self obsession and gave us these natural mirrors to humble us.

Each puddle is different. The jagged or smooth edges form unique frames for these mirrors of an upside down reality. There is no one picture displayed in them; different angles, a change in lighting, and you yourself can give these small portals a personal image of this new piece of reality. Jump into the world and make it a new one, enjoy the simple pleasure of splashing around in puddles and making new ones.

It is a bit strange, using nature to do something unnatural, seeing what is up by looking down.

What you see in puddles can never be seen again.

No person is your specific height, looks in the same way, or has the same interest (or lack thereof) in what lies at your feet. Shouldn’t we cherish these moments of defying reason and what seems rational? In its own way it is a frivolous way of doing something meaningful. Our eyes must be meant for more than being shut in meditation of the greatness we can never fully understand, staring into the sun certainly does not illuminate reality (maybe for brief moment).

Within the limits of these contained pools, there are boundaries on how far you need to look, but there is no end to their depth, the height of the upside down world above you. Puddles can be the fracture in our reality, opening new worlds of thought and wonder. They split the factual world despite being natural themselves. As a matter of fact, they are often formed due to the imperfections of man’s unnatural imposition on nature, sidewalks and roads. However, majestic glassy pictures can be seen in those places formed for that purpose: the small ponds, great lakes, oceans, and even some rivers. But I would encourage people to skip those, or at least to not abandon the sludgy pools of city puddles. There is majesty enough surrounding the great bodies of water; let us allow these insignificant puddles some beauty as well.

In conclusion, we are mere humans pursuing God who is greater than our intellect can imagine, ruling the world that is infinitely more beautiful, greater, and boundless than our minds can comprehend. How then could we hope to enter in, or even to want to leave our own worlds and search for something surpassing ourselves? Puddles are one of the small joys and blessings God has given to mankind, to allow men and women to accidentally be drawn out of their own world and glimpse into another.

We can see out of our own selves through these small windows into the murky but promising shadows that stir within us the longing and deep desire to go beyond our own capacities and the limits we have given ourselves. Even if we only see an imperfect reflection of ourselves, is that not the starting point to perceiving our weaknesses and wanting change? Peering into puddles gives us the promising twinkle of beauty and mystery without being pushed to plunge into the endless expanse of the heavens. Look down, look yourself in the eye, and smile.

Let’s start a movement!

Post your own glorious puddles with

#puddlesofwonder and #commonplaceliving.

Maria Nicklaus

is student at the University of Mary studying Philosophy & Business Administration. She works as a resident assistant but also loves working with the elderly. Having grown up in Minnesota, she loves going outside to take walks & have conversations with friends. She also enjoys piano & writing letters.

Reading Poetry as Vocational: Two Quotes and a Poem

Happy World Poetry Day! Here is the first of hopefully many poetry posts, of many forms, from my good friend Jonathan Peasley. Jonathan and I worked together, and of the many things I miss, perhaps the most tangible are the “Mr. Peasley poetry surprises.” Almost once a week, I would find a sheet on my desk; more often than not, it was a poem from Jonathan. It was like receiving a wondrous gift and also a chance to add something more to my commonplace book. Now these poetry surprises enter the world of the “living commonplace book” here on The Common Things:

“If a poet and a pious man should confer and exchange views, the poet would say: ‘All he lives, I say’; and the pious man would know: ‘All he says, I live.’”

-Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone

“The world is a parable. The world, while it unveils, also veils. The sign unveils, but at the same time it veils. And it is only a particular attention which allows us to sense, under or on the other side of this apparently inert fabric, the vibration of a living body lying behind it - not a mannequin, but a living body.”

-Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon

At dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going.

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle

of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Happy World Poetry Day!

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Jonathan Peasley

didn't know that he loved poetry until he heard Bjork sing "i will wade out" by ee cummings when he was a sophomore in high school. Since then, he has been on the hunt for those who capture in words those lightning flashes of the liminal and sublime that a moment presents. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, two children, and an idiosyncratic cat and dog. He teaches junior high and high school humanities classes at a private school.

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Banner image:

Wind from the Sea, 1947

Andrew Wyeth American, 1917 - 2009

A Carpenter and his Boy

St. Joseph and the Child Jesus by John Collier

Some days there will be painting entries that are just that, a painting. Other days some thoughts will accompany it. Today there are only a few thoughts:

What do we see here?

A stark room, beautiful in its simplicity, but the type of room which when lived in perhaps doesn’t instantly strike one as actually being beautiful. Smooth, handmade walls, a wooden work table, just a few colors, light that penetrates and illuminates. Within these walls, this light streams in from the left, highlighting Joseph, a man of glorious simplicity, a man content to relish the mundane. He stares out, gentle, drawing us in, inviting us to speak, but also allowing us to be still and silent, to just work. At his side, in the shadows, is his son. This painting strikes with its contemporary feel, and pulls the story of Joseph and his son into our place, our time, our world. It breaks down time, and allows then to be now, and now to be then.

Happy feast day of St. Joseph!

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Jess Sweeney is the founder and editor of Commonplace Living. One Sunday in November of 2018 she experienced a simple but glorious morning from which emerged the concept for this project and community. That Sunday included a cup of coffee, beautiful morning light, an On Being interview with Christian Wiman, and drawing a tree in her backyard. That day, the idea of seeing the glory all around, as Dostoevsky describes, really came to life.

Adore: A Definition

When it comes to love, we tend to use the word adore for those more exalted moments. The lover we adore stands on a pedestal, with her or his adorers gathered round below. For some, the word has fallen into the realm of cuteness. ‘Isn’t that adorable!?’ we ask with that irritating lilt up at the end of the sentence. In commercials, the word heralds the kind of Frenchiness that works perfectly to sell perfume—sorry, eau de cologne—in American malls: j’ador. For Catholics, adore is what we do when we gather around a host in a shining gold frame. We either strum guitar, chant Latin, or sit and stare at it. The latter must strike non-Catholics (and this Catholic) as a very strange activity. Not so much what we are looking at (God and Man in a wafer!), but the idea of just looking at him for an hour. This is why my holy hours tend to be holy half hours, coupled with a rather pleasant nap for the second half.

What is this little word doing? Is it lost to commercials, false ideas of love, cuteness, or a religious practice that I should be good at but I am most certainly not? Recently, I did have a lesson in adoration though, which gave me the sense that perhaps this activity is a bit more commonplace than I had thought.

I work part time at my parish as a custos, a rather antiquated position that consists in folding chasubles, picking up plastic bottles in pews, and occasionally painting window frames. It is not a bad gig for someone looking for a little cash and a sense of importance. One of my other tasks is to make sure there are enough consecrated hosts in the tabernacle. On a recent Sunday, I noticed that one of the ciboria was nearly empty with only a variety of broken hosts within. They were all a little small to distribute to the people of God. I brought the ciborium in to show Fr. Ben, who is a hospital chaplain from Nigeria stationed at our parish. He is primarily known around the parish for his unexpected and beautiful singing, driving a Mercedes (Fr. Benz), helping the dying and the sick, and for one time having a rooster that he kept in a spare bathroom for a week.

I asked Fr. Ben what we should do with the hosts. He peered in the ciborium and took it from me. Went over to the sacramentium sink thingie. Carefully, he poured some water in the ciborium, and soaked the various crumbs. Taking his strong black hands, he massaged the crumbs as they slowly dissolved into the water. Watching his hands tend to Jesus, I realized that perhaps, this is what adoration looks like. A regular pile of crumbs is tossed in the trash or to the birds. But for Fr. Ben, these crumbs took a little attention, took a little care. If we adore someone, we take care. Adoration is taking care.

I had long since cast the word aside in my various romantic adventures and certainly didn’t think it applied to married life. Marriage to me entailed getting past romance and adoring and attending to how one can serve another. It is the willingness to take up a duty. It is the duty of delight as Dorothy Day would call it but nonetheless, adoring was far from it. I am a bit of a neophyte to married life but watching Fr. Ben take care of Jesus reminded me that perhaps marital adoration isn’t too different from Fr. Ben’s eucharistic adoration. It isn’t gathering around a pedestal but taking delight in the duty to take care. Sure, golden monstrances are great, but real adoration is when the host is in your hands, when you let God be so weak as to be in your control and then to let go of that control and serve the other.

I rarely apply this lesson since it would take actual effort, but the one time I can think of when I actually adored was not when I bought perfume or wrote a poem for my wife (I have never done either of those things). Rather, it was after a long day of walking and seeing my wife wincing on her tired feet. I took up her feet with my small hands and massaged them. Sure, they probably smelt bad and it wasn’t much fun. But it was taking care. Adoration isn’t for the cute or for Charlize Theron advertisement. It is taking another into your hands and taking care of them.

Terence Sweeney

is good at two things: painting houses and reading books. He has one natural talent: his loud voice. And one hobby: drinking beer and talking about things. He is a Ph. D. student in the Villanova Philosophy Department. He lives in Philadelphia and is a parishioner at St. Francis de Sales. You can find more of his writing at First Things and Dappled Things.

Photo credit: Emma Dallman Design & Photography.

A Training in Beauty: Learning to See Differently

Shwmmm. Shwmm. Downwards we climbed in a vintage elevator, decorative metalwork surrounding us. When it gently came to a halt, my husband opened the door, allowing light to fully flood our space.

Each day’s adventure began this way, and I think this routine helped me fall into the rhythm of the city. We were visitors, strangers really, and yet we were drawn into the soul of the city, welcomed into it; by the bookshop owners, Sagrada Familia guards, lay people, pourers of liquid chocolate, the hostel receptionist, the sardine and vermut bodegista.

Though we were on our honeymoon in Barcelona, I didn’t feel like a tourist, it didn’t feel like we were vacationing. Instead it felt like we had tapped into the rhythm of the city, of its people. This rhythm was one of leisure, but also had the swing of wonder and adventure. David Steindl-Rast says that leisure gives us a kind of rhythm that mimics the heart. He writes,

“leisure makes time come alive…Our very heartbeat is healthy only when it is leisurely. The heart is a leisurely muscle. It differs from all other muscles. How many push-ups can you make before the muscles in your arms and stomach get so tired that you have to stop? But your heart muscle goes on working for as long as you live. It does not get tired, because there is a phase of rest built into every single heartbeat.”

Perhaps because of this rhythm, I felt strangely at home in the city, almost immediately. As though some part of my soul was manifesting itself visually in the city.

I was struck by the beauty of this pace, in forms both grand and simple. There was the beauty of Casa Batlló, a private home designed by Antoni Gaudi. With its textured glass and blue tile walls that turned your vision into the sea. But there was also the beauty of a glass bottle of water. Or a street sign.

This envelopment in beauty resulted in an impulse to try and capture it, keep it, store it, in pictures. So SO many pictures. From coffee shops to street names, from a children’s bookshop to corner bodegas, cups of liquid chocolate to the textures of walls.

The beauty of things, the beauty of the place, seemed to imbue or perhaps was imbued with the rhythm of the people and the city itself. Despite the political unrest, evident from the flags hanging on balconies and windows, Barcelona exuded a kind of peace of life. There didn’t seem to be this sense of rushing and intensity and anxiety. There was a pace that matched the pace of the body, rhythmic, steady, highs and lows, a kind of daily ritual of movement. This leisure, this ritual of sorts, became a part of my mode as well for that week in Barcelona. The pace drew me in and I wanted to be a part of it. The unintentional ritual emerged in different ways: we returned to places, saw the same people, walked down the same subway corridor, creating a kind of memory and attachment, a sense of knowing and being known.

One place we returned to was a little shop we happened upon on our way to Sagrada Familia on the second day of our trip. This little sanctuary of a shop epitomized the particular beauty, whimsy, wonder, and elegant simplicity of Barcelona. The city, and this shop, highlight the handmade, the human, surfaces, textures and objects that have been molded, constructed, or carved by artists of all sorts. The store was called La-a, and here are a few pictures which attempt to capture the spirit of this little place.

And so I returned to this place because I wanted to find something. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to travel in my life, but when I do I’d like to bring back an object, a curiosity, for my current corner, one day cabinet of curiosities. I wanted to find a memory object, a piece of a place I had been, and which on seeing it in my home would pull me back into my memories of it and the beauty and time I found and spent there. I decided that for this trip, La-a was the place to find it. (If you’re curious, my chosen curiosity is the little hand-carved bird in the photos above).

As the trip came to a close, after five and a half glorious days, I began to resign myself to the impending disappointment. Home could not, would not, afford me this level of beauty. Philadelphia—with its busy atmosphere, angry denizens, and dirty streets—could not match up to the beauty I had just been surrounded by. But as we taxied back from the airport into the city and to our now shared home, my eyes felt new, re-focused, attuned to details, textures, little corners of wonder that I had missed before.

What I found was not nostalgic disappointment for this place I had left after five days, but instead I found I was now seeing beauty in unexpected places here in Philly as well. Not only was there new beauty I had never noticed, but there were now places filled with happy memories from my wedding day. Places imbued with new meaning, visions of cityscapes that fit within the framework of my eyes that were now different. I found I didn’t need to re-conform to this busy pace, I could continue and create my pace. One imbued with leisure, ritual, routine, wonder and rhythm. A kind of rhythm of beauty.

In many ways, Commonplace Living found its full form out of this experience. And ultimately what I received in Barcelona it seems was a training in beauty, on seeing it and finding it, no matter the place.

Note: All photos in this post were taken by the author using an iPhone camera.

Jess Sweeney

is the founder and editor of Commonplace Living. One Sunday in November of 2018 she experienced a simple but glorious morning from which emerged the concept for this project and community. That Sunday included a cup of coffee, beautiful morning light, an On Being interview with Christian Wiman, and drawing a tree in her backyard. That day, the idea of seeing the glory all around, as Dostoevsky describes, really came to life.

The Common Things is Launching this Spring

Welcome to Commonplace Living! A new project that seeks to bring together a community of people, “wonderers,” who desire to find the beautiful amidst the everyday.

The Common Things blog will be the space that serves as the “living commonplace book.” Here topics of all kinds will be explored, from definitions to reflections, from analyses and ponderings to art galleries and snapshots of daily living.

I already have some entries lined up but am always seeking more ideas, from topics, to reflections to photographs. If you’d like to contribute and enter the community as one of our Common Things wonderers, fill out this form here.

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