MORNING ASTONISHMENT

     Sometimes, usually in the early morning, a feeling of absolute astonishment comes over me, a sense that my situation in life is indescribably miraculous. I find myself asking, as I did this morning, how I happen to be lucky enough to be located at this moment in time on a smoothly spinning planet in an astonishingly large galaxy in a universe of unthinkable numbers of such galaxies. I find myself marveling at the smallest things – the way the wind, as I write, is furling and unfurling our flag in countless ways; the way our neighbor’s red car is shining in the sunlight; the way Delycia is smoothly turning the pages of a calendar in the kitchen. I’m sometimes almost stock-still with wonder. How, I ask, does my life-giving breath keep coming and going? How do I have many thousands of new thoughts each day, totaling many millions in my lifetime? And where do all these thoughts come from? And where do gentleness and generosity and kindness come from, and how did they become imperishable and infinite? 
     Sometimes, with startling thoughts like these, I understand, once again, that life is something to soar with instead of struggle with.