Yonder Comes Solstice

As the Solstice approaches -- as the existential sand runs down the hourglass, as each beat of the heart echoes, one essential message resounds through the ages: Grab this moment. Hold it lightly in your strongest grip. Grasp it as you would a fragile newborn. Take it on your heart and into your lungs, this ever-quaking, ever-shimmering bit of sea glass discovered on the shifting shore of now.  So...

Right now, whisper to yourself ‘thank you for my life’ and in the coming hours say ‘I love you’ to at least ten people (or ten times ten times ten people -- and creatures alike). Open twenty doors for myriad strangers and thank them for being allowed to do so. Be kind to someone utterly different from you and then do it again and again. Give a street musician all the money in your left pocket. Hang up your phone and ask the person serving you a coffee or ringing up your groceries how their day is going. Kiss a baby. Watch a bird weave a path through the air you breathe; then remind yourself that this is the oxygen that keeps you alive. Embrace the wind and be ever grateful. After all: Carpe diem is only the beginning of the story. You, me and all of us -- we write the rest.