Thursday, May 29, 2008

In the Hub of Circle of Life...

I sit here tonight,(well, really, this morning, in point of fact) filled with a strange sense of the vastness, the miraculousness, and the fragility of life as we know it. In just a short few hours this evening, I have word that my cousin should be delivered of her daughter any moment, and that my friend's sister, who has been battling cancer for maybe 10 years now, and who had been in pallative care, has died. Here we live, on the needle-fine precipice, as soft as the breath in our nostrils, as fleeting as shooting star. Yet that space is filled with the immenseness of a lifetime's experiences. I have been in this place before... a juxtaposition of life and death that makes your head whip around with awe. How can it go so fast? There is a beauty in the realization of how delicate the balance is... each moment moves another grain through hourglass, a pennyweight from one side of the scale to the other... more beautiful still that we have no notion of the total amount being measured. We can only mark what is passed, and guess and hope at what is yet to be. We have to relish the now, and embrace these small hours because as I am being reminded tonight; the little space of our lives, the gift of it, and the joy of it, is in the uncertainty of it. That is what makes the gift precious. Yes, how strange it all is, and how frightening, and how perfect.