"Just To Be Alive Is A Grand Thing"

an oldie hanging out in the sunroom

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable,

racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly 
that just to be alive is a grand thing."
-- Agatha Christie


These days I am feeling that it is a "grand thing to be alive", really it is. Think about it, it really is kind of miraculous.  How did you get here?  Where did you come from? And how does all this apparatus called a body know how to work? And yet I haven't always felt this way.  And I have no particular idea of why I feel this way now but I am grateful that I do. I hope I can remember this when at some time in the future I am "racked with sorrow". 


Perhaps we don't remember this because we are so self centred, focused in on the minutiae of our lives, things like I wish we could get the stairs sanded or how did that mouse get into the basement. But when somehow we take ourselves out of the centre of the snapshot our view changes. I think of the poster I have seen on facebook with man at the top and animals in their descending pyramid. Next to it is another poster with the human placed somewhere in this great web of life, that's where we belong, really.  Who put us in charge anyway? Modern man hasn't been the best steward. I think we should be fired and an ad put out for new custodians of this lovely blue planet. And yet in some strange way it is all just fine. We get what we need, not what we want.  Does that sound new agey? It's not meant at all in that woo woo sort of way. It's meant in the way that actions produce results and reactions which is simply karma. Everything reverberates out into the universe. No exceptions.


But I am filling both our heads with words when really all I wanted to say was this:


the tiny heart bird
inside me
pitches a small song
into the landscape
of life

view from the kitchen

Happy Friday! And here's a small tap with the "ain't it grand to be alive" stick.