Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.

(Hafiz)

Suspended in space, our chubby planet completes yet another pirouette, as it dances around the fire lit in the firmament to warm up its contents, thoughts, and hearts, and nourish life. The miracle of light and consciousness dawns again.

Suddenly, I open my eyes to see anew. To recognize. First, the awareness of waking, a sense of knowing, a moment of unassociated consciousness. Then comes the perception of limbs and sinew, the somebody. Finally, the personality with which I am branded. From my room window, I can see trees, extending their arms in supplicant’s praise, awed and grateful for the sun's shower of nutritious light. Their roots sapping moisture and subterranean atoms in an alliance of life that gives birth to shape and function.

I think about this momentarily and reflect on another glorious morning that my eyes are able to see again, integrating surrounding forms into processes of beauty and understanding, just by turning my head, as I wake up to a point of view. I stand up from bed, defying gravity, in a coordination of movements so complex (it takes perhaps a billion industrious cells), I walk, oh marvel of marvels, displacing this form in space.

My spontaneous morning meditation is interrupted when my cell phone notifies me of incoming morning news. I sigh as I look at the little screen. There is Trump again declaring things, renaming things, fantasizing about annexing other countries, debunking diversity, equity, and inclusion, those children of empathy. Plus, ignoring climate change, the environment, and nature. Anything that has to do with principles of us being in the same boat, as humans, as life.

This behavior, of course, I thought, is nothing new in our history. Yes, back in time Netherlands, Great Britain, Spain, and France had territories in South America, Africa, and Asia, and if you do your history, this seems to be the way we humans have been behaving all along. We are still far from waking up, like Desmond Tutu said, and realizing that we are all one family. Some people now point fingers at Trump, but he was not there when the US went to Vietnam, or Korea, or Chile, or Panama, or Granada, or Mexico, or Iraq. Or when Russia invaded Ukraine, or Japan did the same to China, and so on. There are no innocent regimes and leaders in the human history of annexation, invasion, colonization, war.

There was some optimism after the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union that globalization would mean something more than extending markets, consumerism, and greed. Some thought that empathy, and the concept of one human family, being denigrated now by those in power in the US, and their enthusiastic audience, was finally emerging. After witnessing the growth of racial and anti-immigration bias in the US and Europe, we realize that we are still not seeing a human family. (By the way, when Europeans invaded Africa, and the rest of the world, migration was called colonization.) Many people in the world are still afraid of accepting the unified field of life.

Bored and disgusted by the Trump babble on my cell phone, I made some coffee and switched the incoming breaking news notifications to science news that captured my attention. And turned on, without volume, the TV.

One science headline stated, “evidence suggests that we are suspended in a cosmic sea of dark matter, a mysterious substance that shapes galaxies and large structures in the universe but is transparent to photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force. Our galactic home, the Milky Way, is submerged in dark matter, but this hidden body does not devour us, because its forces cannot touch the regular matter we’re made of.” I thought, thank God, we cannot deal with climate change, Donald Trump, and hungry dark matter at the same time!

Another less alarming article stated that tiny songbirds like warblers migrate thousands of miles, flying at night and resting during the day, to and from their wintering grounds—and unlike many larger birds, they often forgo flocks and travel independently. And recent research found that solitary migrating songbirds seem to cooperate across species, sharing information with other solo travelers about who they are and what to watch out for ahead. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of interspecies empathy and collaboration being there in songbird migrations, while we humans are persecuting and chastising human migrations.

To finish my browsing of scientific news, I bumped into a study that found that people who are more facially expressive are more liked, as it gives others a sense that they understand you, which they like. The study supports that the key function of facial expressivity is to make the emitter more predictable. The study further found that likability has to do with expressivity, and not with a particular emotion. Thus, expressive people are better liked, even when they weren’t especially smiley.

And at that point, an image of Trump having an exchange with a “fake news” reporter came on TV, and I could not help but think about his expressivity and his ubiquitous presence on TV and social networks. Everywhere his face shows up in the media, whether people are supporting him or not. Trump is probably the most seen face of anyone in the world right now. No wonder he has a large following. I thought, expressiveness and ubiquitousness. Oh God…

I decided it was enough of all the news and turned off big and small screens and just sipped my coffee and continued enjoying the new day's apparition. Thinking about breath. I breathe oxygen-coated energy, exhaled by surrounding green forms that captured the sun in leaf, flower, fruit, and bark. I exhale back and give them carbon, resulting from my burning, as I walk, think, admire, and kiss, acquiring every possible experience, like an alien on a mission on Planet Earth.

I imagine worker bee cells in hives ordained, laboriously enabling, through anciently coded processes and swimming particles, this perception, this coordinated action, this vantage point from where I could see, touch, and admire all bundles of Being, that populate this exquisite forest of forms, expressed in all possibilities of imagination. Vibrating, singing, dancing the rhythms of life, on this glorious morning of space and time, where I now meet you and all others and discover our uniqueness, as we intertwine our awe and confusion.

Awed by this intertwined, inexplicable and infinitely diverse miracle of life, including all the babble being repeated through electronic boxes and minds, I feel like bowing secretly at the Existence that makes all happenings possible, and laugh, in joy and gratitude at this incredible Being we all are, that can imagine this universe that in spite of every contradiction, enables the flow of beauty and Love.

Every day is every day. Today, tomorrow, yesterday. Embedded our IDs, forms, cultural personality, and outlook. World news comes in waves, about clashing ideologies, self-interest, calamities, despair, winners and losers, modern technologies, new understandings, and misunderstandings. Yet, life continues its cyclic processes, blooming, seeding, decaying, dying, in all its splendor. And the human spirit and its essence continue to manifest the glory of being, through smiles of valor, embraces of solidarity, impossible loves and dreams, and tenacity in living. It continues to seek completion, in a moment of love, in a dissolving of the other into each other, in a feeling of serenity in the midst of chaos, in a continued upwelling of forces within, manifesting history, relationships, ancient streams, and a goal unseen. Every day.

Yes, every day is another day of opportunity and remembrance, a renewed awakening into relationship potentials, a discovery of inner spaces and outer moments, a miraculous instant of consciousness and being.

We stand at this point of the present, looking back into the relics of moments in the past, or stretching our imagination and hopes to the unmanifested future, each one of us from a particular perspective. Through unique flavors and colors, we each perceive and exhibit this superb creativity, this inexhaustible current of ever-renewing life. A life that gurgles in laughter and tears, in delicate nurturing caresses of light, no matter what pavements and fears are imposed on its seemingly fragile tissues. Each drop of life eventually breaks free of its own ignorance and continues its flow towards the ocean, inevitably, graciously.

Beauty reigns serene in the midst of the clamor of wars and disaster, and kaleidoscopically life’s forces rearrange, and push again in a carillon of morning voices, to achieve the most sublime - that love and understanding of one another that leads to a Silence within - to an inner serenity that soothes this pain of separateness, this insecurity of displacement by the other.

For an instant, we can all feel the beauty of being. For an instant we are all suddenly aware and awake, and realize that all the sweat and blood, the smiles and the kisses, the nights, and days of each one’s lives, might be nothing but stitches in an exquisite tapestry we are all weaving irremediably, no matter what the hype of the breaking news, broadcasting our moments of myopia and ignorance.