Stardust.

This morning I got word that one of my co-workers and his wife had their first baby over the weekend.  The baby arrived three weeks early; in fact, I just saw my co-worker on Friday afternoon and made a joke about baby watch 2018 really ramping up in the coming weeks.  Little did we know…

I thought about this co-worker fleetingly over the weekend, about his family’s anticipation of baby, and their final count-down.  Thinking on it now and knowing their timeline, I imagine he and his wife scampered through my thoughts right about the same time they were, unbeknownst to me, settling into their hospital room, hours to go before baby’s arrival.

Last week I was in Columbus, Ohio for work. I arrived late Tuesday night, and as I unpacked my suitcase in my hotel room, I thought silently to myself about how I was back in the city where I had breathed my very first breath of life years ago, where I had met my parents for the very first time.  The next day, in between meetings, I looked down at my phone and noticed an unprompted text from my mother:  "Isn't is strange to think you're back in the place where you took your first breath of life?"

These sorts of moments make me think about the universe; about this powerful swirling energy connecting all of us in some mystical way. I will think of a friend I haven’t talked to recently, their name popping up randomly in my head as I fold laundry or change the bedsheets, only to look at my phone and see they’ve just texted me.  Someone will mention a book I’ve been meaning to read and later that week I find it left in a lending library at the office.  A beloved song will rumble around in my brain, an old reliable love of a lyric that works its way into my ear on repeat all morning and then, later, at random it will surface while my phone is in shuffle mode on Spotify, nevermind that I haven’t played the song or the artist who sings it in months or sometimes years.    

It would be easy to shrug these moments off as weird occurrences or strange coincidences.  But I can't take that route, can't willingly explain things away on scientific fact or simple happenstance. I believe there is more at play here, that the universe is far more magical and radiating then we can begin to imagine. There is a Serbian proverb that I love, “You are made of stars.”  I suppose in the end it all comes down to what we want to believe, how we choose our connectivity. On my end though, I’ll take the magical.  I will watch and revere in the moments when it feels like the universe has my back, when it is giving me a gentle nudge or a wink – stars and beyond.