On the Incredible Giftedness of Life--your life!

Lesson for the Fierce Landscape program, week of Feb. 21.

Once upon a time, a man loved a woman.
She loved him too. They made love.
Out of the joy of that moment, something wonderful happened, a miracle that we can scarcely even after five centuries of science hardly understand.

Your mother’s tiny egg, no bigger than the head of a needle, was met and pierced by your father’s tiny, tiny sperm. That tiny speck was one thousandth the size of your momma’s waiting yearning eager egg.

Your father brought in that tiny tiny speck of maleness, his total DNA, amounting to 3 billion digits. That met your mother’s DNA, also of a different 3 billion digits. Out of that joining was the very first spark of your life. At that moment the fertilized egg was throbbing with new energy of a DNA never before imagined in the cosmos. At that moment, every single characteristic of who you are today was contained: the size of your nose, the color of your eyes, the length of your body, every part that you now have was there in your genes, so tiny that only a microscope could find it.

Consider that moment did not have to happen. But it did, and you are here today. The miracle of your conception you can never grasp fully enough. You did not have to happen. But that spark did happen.

There followed the next miracle as that tiny egg now throbbing with life attached itself to the uterine wall of your mother’s body, after a little. But only after you had already multiplied many many times. The tiny egg that was you needed food and found a place to get it inside your mother. You grew and grew and grew and grew for nine whole months, and every step of that was also a miracle. It did not have to happen, but it did. You did.

After that long nesting, you--now weighing an incredible six pounds or so, were ready to emerge into the world. There was pain, great pain, blood and tearing, but suddenly, with a little help, there you were, a helpless rosy blood & fluid - covered infant, crying at the coldness of the real world. Another miracle. It did not have to happen.

Your lungs had to be cleared of fluid, you had to be inspected. But your tiny mouth was already eager for the nipple, and you began to drink the milk of your mother’s breast when you had no other awareness.

For many months, all you did was eat, sleep and poop, eat, sleep and poop, eat sleep poop. And someone was there every hour, if not every minute for days and months and several years to make sure you ate, and were kept clean of your poop.

The miracle that you were continued. You opened your eyes and looked and begin to see, and smell, and taste, and cry, and poop. See, smell, sleep, cry, poop.

You are today a walking miracle who did not deserve to be here. Your life is an incredible gift.

The greatest question in life is Why Are You Here at All. You did not have to be, and Yet, here you are. Why? Out of the great mother mystery matrix of millions and billions of years, here on this planet is each of you. Here I am, conscious of my unique life and I cannot even tell you why or how I am aware.

Every step or development of your life is a miracle.
Undeserved. What could any of you, any of us do to deserve the incredible gift of life that we have.

And look what we have survived, hook or crook, again, often undeservedly so. How many Guardian Angels have been protected this small child, this testing, climbing, reaching mischievous little boy that you were. This rebellious teen-ager. This boy child/man

We are daily, each morning we awaken, faced once more with the Giftedness of Life. How shall we spend it? What shall I do with my life today. 1000 waking minutes per day? 7000 waking minutes per week.

Now there is a hole in our heart longing for Something Else. Love, Ecstasy, Passion, Some Great fulfillment. We may have deepened, enlarged that hole by drugs, so we have created a huge craving for Something More.

Now here is the basic choice of human life. We shall always have Something Missing. We can and have often focused on that or we can choose to focus instead on the Miracle we are part of. Each of us choose. Daily, moment by moment. Will you cheat the Gift?

Do you choose to embrace the giftedness of life, the miracle that you are, the longing of love you are called into. Or will you choose to stay incomplete w. always a sense of Missing Something. One is Light, the other is Darkness. Resentment or Hope. Imagine! Choose!

Every minute of your life you choose to focus, either on What's Missing, or on the Miracle that calls you out of yourselves into Giftedness, celebration, love, joy, hope and newness.

–Meditation by Paschal Baute, 2/21/05