Of all the issues that occupy my mind in the course of a day . . . this one rarely finds its way to the top. Among the sports scores and the virus surge and the war in Yemen and the Christmas sales and the minutiae of my life, it seldom occurs to me - gees, I am alive.
It’s Fall and the leaves are turning. A new season appears and I am here to witness it. When I was born, it was the Fall. I don’t remember the brisk breezes or the tangy coolness in the air of the Michigan weather but I’m sure I felt it. My first experience of a new world was in the Fall. Maybe that’s why I Iike this season.
I arrived in the Fall and slowly began to notice that I was alive, in a world. I existed. And there was a world. It had a sky above and ground below.
Not something to take for granted, my friends, some planets have no solid land. You would just be swirling around in the atmosphere if you were on Saturn. Probably made up of methane and ammonia and other pernicious chemicals. We have solid land and soil. That’s important. Things grow here. It’s a great planet!
It is a great planet and along with our Sun and our Moon, we think it’s pretty special.
And it is, it’s special because we are here. We can appreciate it. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean much. I mean it might mean something to the bugs and the microbes, but who knows what that is?
The human body, like our planet, is feature rich. It has all kinds of features. Yes it can hear sounds but it can also see where it’s coming from. Different frequencies of sensory inputs.
We can move. We’re not stuck in the ground like a tree. Articulating joints make possible many free movements.
I guess I require of my reader some imagination on this point. Our skeletal system, all intertwined and interconnected with tendons and ligaments and muscles, is able to perform prodigious feats. Running and jumping and rolling down the hill. Swimming and riding bikes and climbing mountains. Skipping and walking and driving cars. When hooked up to our brain, we can drive a computer (sort of an external brain) and that’s no simple feat.
Our brain, of course, can process massive amounts of information and remember it, but there is intelligence all over our body. We harbor a colony of microbes (many colonies actually) whose members number in the trillions! They have their own smarts. They are symbiotic, meaning they benefit us and we benefit them. Something the humans have forgotten how to do amongst themselves. The Golden Rule, basically, it’s been around forever. As long as the microbes which is about 3 billion years.
We have 3 billion year old wisdom in our body. We also have all the accumulated experiences of our lifetime stored in there somewhere. Every time I crash on my bike I know not to do that again and my whole body seems to know it too.
The features of the human body are possibly endless because as you start to list them, more appear. It’s like infinity in there. We’ll never discover the end of it.
We’ve got a planet and a body. Both stupendous. That would comprise existence, the most stupendous thing of all.
To exist is hard to appreciate because you can’t compare it with anything else. To not exist? That’s unimaginable.
Contemplate existence. See what you can come up with. Something good is bound to happen.
Like the feeling of being alive on a planet and watching the seasons change. As John Burroughs put it in his book Signs & Seasons (which I am reading at the moment), “The great globe swings around . . . like a revolving showcase; the change of the seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door and linger long in the passing. What a voyage this is we make without leaving for a night our own fireside.”
Lovely. They liked long sentences back then, with lots of semicolons. Nowadays not so much; three or four words will do.
Relax. Sit back. Listen to some music on Youtube. PLUME Observe the world. Observe yourself observing the world. It’s a miracle. That you exist is a miracle. That this world exists is a miracle and that you can perceive it and interact with it is a miracle. Triple play.
Forget all the scriptures and the tall tales of miracles and revelations and super heros. You are the miracle. How about that? You are the superhero, if there is one. Witness the miracle, oh human! Angels and superheroes.
Once upon a time in a land far far away, I was in an airport departure hall and getting ready to board my flight back home. I had fallen ill while in the city I was visiting - no appetite, no energy and a throbbing headache. I wasn’t thinking very clearly either. As I stood there waiting in the security line, my carry on in one hand, my shoulder bag in the other, a woman came up to me and performed a gesture. She supported my shoulder and my body in a certain way with her hands as if to prevent me from falling. Then she looked at me, assessed my condition and left. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, splashed cold water on my face, went back and stood in the line. I neither fell nor fainted the entire way home. I had been touched by an angel. That’s how I remember it.
As I write this I feel the vagaries of aging entering my body one by one. No you are not going to be young forever, it seems to be saying, this body will grow old and die. Hopefully in a gradual long pleasant slide. Like kids in the playground, they climb to the top of the slide and then release themselves into the downward trajectory and the thrill and the whoosh until it’s all over and they get off. Other kids are swinging, with their parents pushing them, as if they will never stop.
My friend Miguel left this world voluntarily when he decided to end the all night long, three times a week dialysis that he had endured for twenty years. He had some vagaries. Unable to walk, unable to do anything really because of the amyloid proteins that had built up in his joints. And yet whenever I would encounter him in his motorized wheelchair, out and about, or visit him in his home he was always happy and full of life. Even the last time I saw him, lying in his bed, unable even to sit up, he was delighted and smiling and gracious. I imagine he spent quite a few days looking out at this world from his ravaged body while rolling around in his motorized wheelchair on Broadway, and thinking to himself: I’m leaving this place soon, I won’t be here anymore.
So if you don’t think superheroes exist, or angels, I’d like to suggest that they do. They exist just as much as you and I do.
The leaves are beginning to fall, one by one from their home in the sky. They will fall until the trees are bare and the ground is carpeted with red and yellow leaves. It’s a miracle. The air will chill as planet Earth tilts away from the sun. Atleast for our hemisphere. South America is having Spring. A miracle. Nature arising from its dormancy while here it’s going to sleep.
Miracles abound. Infact I would go so far as to suggest that this is heaven. Right here on earth. The one you don’t have to die to go to, anyways. The one we can experience while we are alive. A bloody miracle. Hey I’m not even religious and I see miracles everywhere.
music: Nathanel Schroder - Why worry
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