Circling the Sun.

A morsel of flesh draped on a scaffold of bone, pressed against an enormous spinning ball whirling around a nuclear fire too massive to contemplate. Which is itself a pinprick of pale yellow light in a vast darkness. I am small. Forty-one circuits of this cone of gravity. A paper in the basement of a hospital somewhere says so. It is inked with the imprint of my feet.

I am my own kind of light. I am a thing of intention and I have in me whatever it is we have in us that makes us alive. I have learned, after a great length of indifference, to cherish that. To hold as precious the clockwork of living. To be in myself in the world a grateful part of it.

This is my line of fire in the sky. I am a beating heart, boiling in the void. Forty-one times that beating heart has circled its star. But whatever I am made of has been here from the beginning. And whatever I am made of will be here until the end. We are all eternal.

While I linger here, I will be a voice for gratitude. I will wonder without apology. I will stumble and I will stand and I will stride forward again. I am small. But I am big to me. I am the only me that I have. I have gone, in my estimation of myself, from the center to the periphery. I have surrendered to irrelevance. But I am still me, to me.

So here, a strange reaction of chemistry and physics has survived another passage of its great circle. This last one was a good one. I hope we all have a good one this time round. All these shining lights. We are a beacon. I am a flame in a fire of a whole burning world. A fire of life. Blazing in an infinite night.