I must be on a roll here. This is the third streak of inspiration in three days. I haven't had time to woodburn, now that I am "officially" employed, but surprisingly, while work has stifled my artistic creativity, it isn't squashing my mental creativity.
I realized today just how little people notice the very essense of life, and how much they take for granted. Citizen #0000590 from Sunshineville, Anystate, USA wakes up and turns on his TV. He eats his breakfast, he surfs the news on his fifth generation Iphone. Has the fifth generation come out yet? Anyway, as the clock draws nigh the top of the hour he rushes out the front door to head to work. His head is down. He is grumbling, likely cursing everything and everybody. I would say Citizen #0000590 is in a bad mood. This is normal. Citizen #0000590 has just Facebooked his plight for his 862 friends to see. This has made him feel only a little better. But Citizen #0000590 is about to have to Facebook more curses as his car hesitates to start. He will be late for work...again. While he is busily facebooking the new turn of events....the lights, suddenly go out. He is left in a bone-chilling, lead-dense blackness cut only the light from his fifth generation ipod illuminating his face and the surrounding surfaces of the interior of his "Blankety-blankety car".
The sun just went out. Science is warning us that one day the star we call the sun will fail us, and there are blips of concern from the general public when people mention "the end of the world" or the "sky falling". But really, would Citizen #0000590 really care that someone turned off the sun, or would he just facebook it?
As I lay on my couch at break, taking a power nap to recharge my batteries after the two waves of maddness at my workplace, I contemplated this. Not the sun refusing to shine...but the essense of life. My every breath. The peace, and quiet. The vibrations of sound waves from the strings of my sister's violin in the next room hitting my eardrums, teasing the musical areas of my brain... My beating heart, my pulsing arteries... again, the unconscious contracting of my diaphram that keeps me breathing when I am too busy to think about breathing. It is something we all take for granted. Our own lives.
We must admitt we are fighters, but only when we have to be. People suffer vehicle and sporting accidents and cling to life with all their might as complete strangers struggle to keep them alive and transport them to a hospital. Those victims may or may not have much appreciated their life while they had it. They are at the moment fighting to keep it with all their might...but very few have appreciated what they had when they had it.
I write this simply because I have been taking the time to appreciate these things over the past few days. The busier I become, the more time I try to make to remember that my exsistence is blessed. As I stepped out my door today, my mind was on getting in my car, getting safely to work, and on time. My mind was on what might happen today at work, and what might happen tommorrow. At the same time, another area of my cerebellum was contemplating yesterday's happenings, and how it all effected today. Then, halfway to the car,...I just stopped. I felt something warm all over my body. It was pleasant. I hadn't noticed it much before. It felt good. It made my heart leap, brought a little smile to my face. I closed my eyes and lifted my face up to it. I have never been able to look straight at it and most of the time I ignore it and forget that it there. That bright star, the sun, was making my day. So far, it has never failed. Scientists say it can cause skin cancer and do all kinds of harm to the eyes if I don't wear sun lotion and expensive sunglasses and all kinds of junk like that....it might. All I know is, I like that star right where it is. Not too far from earth, not too close. It warms me, it feeds me, it makes me smile, it tickles my heart (emitts energy and radiation essential for life), it is there. And I like it.
Nobody seems to take the time to facebook it because it is always there, doing the same ol' boring thing it always does. Shining. It never does anything else. So maybe that is why people forget about it. The only time they really remember it is when it is "too hot" outside. When I look up at the night sky, I don't think much of those far away stars as being like the earth's sun.
But then, I don't think much about the fact that I'm breathing. Even when we think of death, we don't much about the fact that if we were dead, we wouldn't be breathing. To us, breathing is comparisant to exsistance. Each breath I draw...is a blessed one. I enjoy my life....every breath of it.
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