When our youngest daughter, Mila, was still quite young, around eight or nine years old, it was her job to filter the cow’s milk. After doing so, she would write the date on the glass jar so we knew which jugs to drink first. At some point she had decided that she needed to liven things up a bit so she started including a corny joke on each of the jugs. Soon enough she was writing little notes on the meat we packaged up to freeze and the bags of bones we cut up and stored in our freezer. It was so much fun to find her little notes and jokes that we encouraged her to keep doing it long after the novelty had run its course for her. She was kind enough to oblige.
It was somewhere in that time that I decided that maybe I should write a little note on the butter I make throughout the summer months. I package my butter in glass jars and keep them in the freezer, enough to get us through a year. Summer butter is the good stuff - the premium fat from a cow is getting concentrated nutrition from the sweet forages of summer. It’s healthier and tastier than the butter that comes from a cow on winter rations. Even when I lived in a city, I was sure to buy a year’s worth of butter from my farmers in the dog days of summer.
Inspired by Mila, I started the labelling custom with my butter a few years ago. There’s not much space on the lid of a wide mouth jar, but there is just enough to write a few little words about something that was happening in our lives on that summer day when I was churning the butter we would dig out of our freezer months later.
What I didn’t realise was how much joy it would bring to us to retrieve a frozen jar of butter in the middle of January and read to one another whatever event I captured on that day, many months earlier. Sometimes a jar may say, “barn swallows have arrived”, “heifer calf met her first porcupine”, “feasting on sweet peas and butter in garden”, “sour cherry ice-cream in cow trough”, or “sunset and loons with mezcal and Ella” - that sort of thing.
Everyone of those little encapsulations holds a story that we get to relive, laugh about, bemoan or reflect on. And that’s the point of it - grabbing onto these little things that happen, over and over again in a day, and offer them up to our future selves. In the time each of these events are happening, they can be frustrating or sweet, a little blip in time that joins all of the other blips in time, and that’s the whole point. We remember the big things, mostly. We easily absorb calamities and great gestures of kindness, but it’s those little things that, when resurrected by a prompt, train our eyes and hearts to the smallness around us that truly is the exquisite and humble honest beauty we can find in the mundane of a day.
«The “Radiance of the Ordinary” if you will. Shameless book plug, but there it is - saying it in just another way - the very stuff that fills our lives with meaning and love.»
We don’t have to make butter to build up the muscle of heart-centered seeing in our