It’s good, I really feel, to start a brand new 12 months, or a brand new day, with slightly reservoir of gladness. Listed here are some gladnesses I’ve gathered, and two new chicken divinations I’ve made, as a acutely aware manner of consecrating our days with the blessed undeniable fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t should be born, and but right here we’re with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever broadening hearts.
Bless the final aspen leaf, waving on the tip of the skeletal department like a vivid yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life.
Bless gravity for the way indiscriminately it provides itself to a mote of mud and to a mountain, for the way it retains each single celestial physique in orbit for this good cosmos to cohere, for the way it presses your lover’s physique in opposition to you to gladden the pores and skin of the soul.
Bless the one who broke your coronary heart to maintain their very own from breaking on the exhausting fringe of the braveness known as love.
Bless paper for the way in which it may kindle a campfire and a revolution, for the scrumptious confusion of cedar and velvet on the tip of your finger every time you flip the web page, for its whispered promise that when all of the empires of silicon and bit go the way in which of Babylon and Rome, it is going to stay the keeper of our tales.
Bless desk tennis for its absurd delight, for the boyish smile on the wrinkled face of the person on the rec heart as he props his cane in opposition to the wall to choose up the paddle.
Bless blue, for making the bluebird and the sky it flies by what they’re.
Bless consciousness, for making blue totally different to me than it’s to you.
Bless arithmetic for giving a poll its weight and Bach his Goldberg Variations.
Bless the clouds, the way in which they drift throughout the sky just like the thought bubbles of birds, the way in which they forged a spell in opposition to indifference every time they awn the setting solar.
Bless probability for the way, throughout the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific occasions stretching all the way in which again to the primary particle collisions within the first stars, occasions every one in every of which might have gone otherwise, it sang the intense clear word of you over the din of in any other case.
Bless time, for the way regardless of all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little additional bit to blaze and gave us, every one in every of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the everlasting silence of not but and by no means once more.
Bless the stranger on the bookstore who out of the blue smiles the smile, the precise smile, of my lifeless buddy, as if to remind me that nothing we love is ever lifeless, that love is the smile that saves life from mere existence.
Bless each grain of sand that made the glass that made binoculars to disclose the cormorant’s dazzling rimmed eye the colour of Uranus and telescopes to disclose the nebula three thousand lightyears away wanting again at us like an enormous cosmic iris with its secret data of what we’re.
Bless data, all of the species of it — how the small black seed is aware of to interrupt into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we all know that when the home burns down and the tyrant takes workplace and the toe pokes by the final good sock, we nonetheless have one another.