A Deep River Year
 November 19, 2014

It is a cold and quiet morning. In the southern sky a sliver of a moon hangs motionless as a line of geese make their hemline on the horizon. But this quiet morning belies the great speed of things. We are already in the fading days of November and the trees are mostly bare now. Wasn’t it just summer? There is still an air conditioner in the window, needing to be stored in the attic. And yesterday Phyllis had to take a hair dryer to remove the hose frozen to the outdoor faucet on the north side of the house. Where has the time gone?

But the speed of our lives is nothing compared to the actual speed of our world. I've read that earth is rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour. For earth to circle the sun in a year, our planet must travel about 66,000 miles an hour. And the sun and our solar system itself is moving through our galaxy at a breakneck speed as well. One estimate is that the sun is dragging us all through the Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 miles per hour. And our galaxy itself is speeding outward from that initial bang at 1.3 million miles per hour, moving toward some mysterious concentration of matter in the faraway depths of the universe--something called "The Great Attractor."

At these enormous speeds, we should be flinging ourselves onto the earth and holding on for dear life. But gravity helps us out, and instead we walk peacefully through our quiet morning, forgetting altogether that we are infinitesimal specks in the vastness of a wildly expanding cosmos. But our specks, to us, our precious. This week my wife, Phyllis, has a major birthday, a celebration of her appearance on this planet. It feels like we have travelled too quickly to this milestone, but today I stop to marvel at a sliver of moon and a thread of singing geese and the wonder of this one, good life. What a ride!

Birthday

We ride through time and space
 breathless from birth
 at the speed of it all,
 at the lives around us
 which flicker for a moment
 and fade away,
 the echoes of billions of heartbeats
 lost in the wake of our little years.
 But we are here,
 the glow of candles on a cake
 reflecting in our eyes
 to remind us that the this one life
 has been, for us, a shining light.
 Though the world may sail into the darkness,
 though stars may burn and die,
 though this speck of cosmic dust may seem
 as nothing in the great vastness,
 She has lived with flowers in her heart,
 rocked a baby in her arms
 and nestled a squirrel in her hair,
 flung herself into the sea
 and dipped her fingers into earth
 as if she could find there some timeless joy,
 and laughed so wondrously
 that for a moment the universe stood still
 grateful that such a thing as Phyllis
 could ever be.

--Timothy Haut, November 19, 2014