It Just Continues

Today, like every other day, I awaken and brush my teeth, wash my face and shave. Beat back the plaque, dirt and stubble that accumulated over night. Go out and greet the tree in my back yard that was my height when we planted it and now is almost two stories high. I clipped my fingernails that had been growing for a few weeks and notice I need a haircut (not much hair to cut, but still it grows!). I’ll return to Bach’s 20^th to 24^th Preludes and Fugues and see if the notes and rhythms are lodged yet deeper in my fingers, hearing and circuitry of the brain. The book itself is dog-eared and in the Velveteen Rabbit Club, loved and hugged over time and thus, entirely real. 

 

Today new lines and wrinkles will ever-so-slightly add to my life’s stories etched on my face. All the body parts that have resisted gravity’s tugs like commendable soldiers will have surrendered a little bit more. The thousand and one rhythms of daily life— stubble and shave, dirty and clean, hungry and full, asleep and awake— continue to circle around. 

 

Outside of this body, the sun will appear to rise and move in its steadfast arc across the sky and then let the moon have its turn. And in turn, the moon has its own cycle of waxing and waning, its apparent enlarging and diminishing that is really just a light show. The moon itself remains the same size. 

 

Each morning, it gets light a little later and each evening, dark a little earlier. The leaves of deciduous trees bid a slow farewell to chlorophyll and reveal their true color. They lose their grip on the branch and eventually let go and circle down to the waiting ground, where their bright color turns to drab brown and they start to meld into the soil. The air temperature drops, in some places (like San Francisco) the rain awakens from its hibernation and tries a few practice runs (like yesterday) of light sprinkles before announcing itself in a full-blown storm. (Due Monday, some say.)

 

The grand rhythms both inside and outside our body keep circling and circling inside the larger cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death. As the character in the film Grand Hotel notes, “People come. People go. Nothing ever happens.” And yet everything happens within the music of all these rhythms playing at once. Joyfully so. 

 

PS And yes, also maddeningly so, as this cartoon suggests. But that’s a matter for another post. For now, on this sunny, crisp Autumn morning, newly washed, shaved and fed, I’m sticking with the joy and the gratitude to be inside the music of life.