I read, recently, about a painting done in the late 1300s, a five-paneled altar piece depicting the Passion of the Christ, that was, during the English Reformation, turned upside down and used as a table, to save it from being destroyed by the reformers. Whoever it was that turned the painting upside down (thereby transforming it into a table) forgot what he had done or died without telling anyone and the painting then passed the next four hundred some years as a simple, unassuming table, until one day somebody dropped a pencil and bent down to retrieve it, and in doing so, happened to look up at the underside of the table and saw the bright blues, the gold, the reds of the painting.

Why does it please me so much to think about this?

Is it because the discovery turned on an everyday occurrence, something as simple, as ho-hum, as a pencil being dropped?

Is it the fact that nothing would have changed, no discoveries would have been made, if the person who dropped the pencil had not tilted her head back and looked up?

Or is it the notion that so much luster, so much beauty is hiding, literally, right under our noses; and that we walk around unaware, willfully ignorant, almost, of the marvels which surround us?

Or maybe it is this: that when I read a good poem or a wonderful story, I get that same feeling, of having dropped something and in the simple act of bending to retrieve it, everything is suddenly changed: the everyday is transformed, and the wonder, the majesty underneath the ordinary, the miraculous that I knew was there all along, that I believed in, even though I could not always see it, has been, suddenly, revealed to me.

This, this, is what I love: the idea that brilliance is everywhere and that it is only waiting for our attention, waiting for us to simply bend down, look up.