Dear friends,
Each of us came into this world as a helpless baby,
Totally dependent on the people around us.
By some miracle of chance each of us came to be here at all.
The statistics against you being you or me being me are simply beyond comprehension,
Beyond the possibility of calculation.
We survived a period of growth in the womb,
We endured the drama of childbirth,
We came to witness the magical growth of mind and body and here we are today,
Held by gravity to a spinning ball as it makes its journey around the Sun year after year after year.
The Irish singer-songwriter John Spillane captures the magic of this planetary motion with poetic accuracy in his song Dance of the Cherry Trees,
The lyrics of which include these lines.
Let me tell you about the cherry trees.
Every April in our town they put on the most outrageous clothes and they sing and they dance around.
Hardly anybody sings or dances,
Hardly anybody dances or sings.
In this town that I call my own you have to hand it to the cherry trees and they seem to be saying to me anyway you know we've traveled all around the Sun you know it's taken us one whole year well done everyone well done.
Words from John Spillane in his song Dance of the Cherry Trees.
If we are blessed with the gift of sight we see the ever-changing skies by day,
The first hint of dawn,
The warm glow of sunset and in the night we see the spectacle of stars and planets all part of our home galaxy that we so fittingly call Milky Way.
Blessed with the gift of hearing we are surrounded by the sounds of nature,
The singing of birds,
The rustle of the wind,
The breaking of waves on the shore and most amazingly of all our ability to communicate with each other through the gift of language,
Through the art of writing and the wonders of technology we have the ability to pass our inherited knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next.
All this and more are a reason why we might spend time each day in gratitude.
Gratitude for our being in the world and thankfulness for all the unearned benefits that come to us day after day after day.
May you be blessed with the capacity for greater awareness of this abundance and may that awareness add to your sense of wonder and awe for the miracle that is your life.
Namaste.
You you
