My son is 49 today, a magic number, seven times seven, an entry number as he gathers all together before a half century comes to pass.  I pause in contemplation.   49 years: Birth branching connection in waves of immersion and growth.

We are all connected. To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.

– Neil DeGrasse Tyson

August is folding wings and September is on approach.  My family has four birthdays as we move through September and October, so, for me, it is a time of birth.  

The sun rises later these days but with such clarity, I simmer like a leaf in awareness of release.   

Two quotes guide my day today.

Robin Wall Kimmerer: 

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them an intention and compassion – until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a “who” but an “it,” we make that maple an object. We put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying “it” makes a living land into natural resources. If maple is an “it,” we can take up the chainsaw.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.

Rilke in The Book of Hours translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows:

All becoming has needed me

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

Rhythm pulses in me!

I wake up noticing it’s still dark at five.  We’re moving into a new season, and yet, warmth is still to come before the light dims to transition again.

A friend has received a pacemaker.   It saves a life and changes it, so he’s with a series of limitations right now.

In this, I feel, nourish, and invite an extra tenderness to my heart today, as it beats loyally between my lungs.

I remember walking in Muir Woods in the winter rain.  There was no place to sit as the ground, plants, and benches were wet, and I felt myself moving like the stream.  

My cousin who is in Hospice now was told by her oncologist to read Eckhart Tolle.  I thought it odd to suggest reading at this point but then I came across these lines of his.  

Through death you will find yourself because you no longer identify with form.

I’m alive right now, identifying with form, and gratefully appreciating the rhythm of my heart, and that is this moment, now.  

Peaceful, the gentle beat!