I am not celebrating the birth of a nation but I do feel the awe of glittering stardust flowing in my veins; I remember that every living creature that was and is shares this stellar inheritance.
That joyful hummingbird outside my window right now is liberated by living: free to follow his destined hummingbirdness path. His tiny body is a microcosm of mine, and all beings’ a macrocosm of his precious self.
A jay picks up a snail from the garden bed and places it on the wood 3”x4” that edges the porch. My dog sniffs the shell as she steps over the beam.
Baby finches squeal a highpitched desperation…or gratitude…I’m not sure which, when the adult comes to offer seed.nourishment. The redfinch male chatters incessantly from a tree branch: time for a feeding but a human wanders her yard too close to the nest.
That cat’s black fur contains at least four dozen burs; the dog’s bed and the carpet and her own white fur are surfaced with sharp points: hundreds of them. And running fingers through my own wet hair in the shower I am prickled by a few tenacious lingerers after fifteen minutes of plucking off my arms, legs, feet, and clothing a texturedplantskin of spiny seed cases. Last season’s green glory is this season’s unstoppable, relentless, overly generous offering of prickles – small.tan.irritating.prolific.
From the heavy.dark confines of a meeting room, my eyes focus on the slice of miracle framed by the open door: clusters of peaceful pink blooms on the heaven.greenest.tree against the sacred.blue.heavens.
I celebrate the crow who sits inches from me on a fence playing the staring game. I praise the pink and the white flowers that have sprung up in a drought. I bow down—quite literally with hands flat on dirt—and close my eyes so that I can listen to the wisdom of a breeze that lives in this valley.
It is this receptive-hearted moment that creates the conditions for peace, for compassion, for silence that bequeaths impassioned direction. This is a day—as are each of the forty.two.million minutes of our lives—to celebrate unity with the nestlings’ anthem, with the finch parent’s dutiful attentions, with the bespangled arbor, with the geography.ignorant wild plant stalk, with the cochlear swirls of the snail shell. We are all one community without political boundaries, geography-free, sidereal, celestial, starmatter.
(Orig. posted in July 2014.)
