“Do ye the little things in life.”
~St. David

For most of you, a holiday probably flew by without notice. March 1st is St.David’s day and in the area of the country where I was born and grew up there would have been banquets featuring potato-leek soup and tables adorned with bouquets of daffodils. St. David is the patron saint of Wales, whose cathedral and former monastery sit in a lush, green area on the southwestern coast of Wales. Daffodils are the national flower of country and St. David is, for some reason, often associated with the green and hardy leek. In addition to the yellow flowers and the not so colorful soup, there would have been singing. With the Welsh, there is always singing and for this I am grateful and sorry to have not been present at one of these celebrations.

On Saturday as I did my ritual turn of the calendar pages onto a new month, I made a mental note that it was St. David’s Day. And several times over the last couple of days I have thought about those things that go into creating the rituals that surround the celebrations we hold dear. Given that I am also planning a pilgrimage to Italy later in the year,one that walks in the steps of mystics now known as saints, I also thought about what causes a person to become known as a saint. For St. David, it was not anything most of us would aspire to. He lived mostly on bread and water and his monks were known to have refused the use of horses to plow the land choosing instead to do the hard work of animals using their own muscles……all this on the fuel of a pauper’s diet. He became a saint because, it is said, that while speaking to a group of pilgrims a dove alighted on his shoulder and as he spoke the ground where he was standing rose up to create a hill. Anyone who has traveled in this area knows that hills are not in short supply! Why the creation of another one is a means to sainthood is puzzling.

But it is the words that were supposedly spoken on his deathbed that capture my imagination. “Do ye the little things in life.”, he is said to have offered his followers in his last moments. There is great comfort for me in those words. So much of the advice we are given in our lives have to do with how to become ‘great’, whatever that means. Particularly in our country I think we are often pushed, and even push the idea onto our children, of taking the steps that will catapult us not to just the top of a hill but to the pinnacle of a mountain. For St. David his dying message was to pay attention to the ‘little things in life’.

And so today, in his honor, I plan to do just that. I will try to take the small, ordinary steps of paying attention to the little things that make up my day. The few tasks before me. The laundry that needs folded. The dishes that must be washed. I will use the muscles of my own body, my own God-image body, to do the small work of the day. I will eat simply and with gratitude for such humble yet delicious tastes of vegetables like the leek. I will search out the color and beauty of Creation like the daffodil…… that harbinger of spring for which we all are so desperately longing.

In honor of St. David, I will do all these things and I will also allow a song to fill my heart. Who knows? I might even let that song slip out into the frigid day to float on the icy wind. Today I will nurture the ‘little things’. It will not lead to sainthood. But I have a hunch it might lead to a mighty fine day.