Miracles

“There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is.”  Albert Einstein

MIRACLES….

In my humble opinion, while I can find the miracles in many moments, there are miracles and then there are MIRACLES.

April 8th and 9th of 2024, Henry & I celebrated two, what we both deem, MIRACLES!

April 8th we drove 2 hours south from our home in St. Louis, MO to a perfect location on a perfect, sunny day and witnessed 4 perfect minutes of totality during The Great American Eclipse of 2024. The exact symmetry of having the moon pass directly in front of the sun, blocking the light in such a perfect way, felt like a MIRACLE!

April 9th, 2024 we celebrated the 5 year anniversary of when Henry gave me one of his kidneys!  The fact that we met when I sent a text and got a wrong number in 2012 and he was then my kidney donor 7 years later is a MIRACLE all in itself!!

April is National Donate Life  Month.  The theme for 2024 is Donors are Superstars; inspired by the night sky and the billions of stars that make up the Universe.  A reminder that even in the darkest night, there is light.

Light and darkness and stars and the Universe and miracles infiltrate my thoughts.  My brain gets all tangled up in sweeping feelings of joy and wonder at my spiritual connection to the universe, all the while being transfixed by the numbers and data of math and science.

Yes, this is me talking.  Tie dye, concert going, what would Kasey wear Wednesday, me.

My brain lobes often join hands and take me down a path where everything meets.

In the scope of miracles and synchronicity and love and stars and moons and eclipses and existence…how does it all fit together?

Come with me on this path…

The Earth in the Universe… 

I start with the granddaddy of all antiquity and massiveness; The Universe.

The Universe is all of space, matter, energy, time…It is the totality of all that exists.  Science says it’s 13.8 billion years old and the distance to the edge of the observable vastness is said to be 93 billion light years.  I do not know how to comprehend, much less, explain this, but that’s really OLD and really BIG!!!

Within this monstrosity of time and space, the Universe is home to 100-200 billion galaxies.

A galaxy itself, is a huge collection of gas, dust and billions of solar systems, all held together by gravity, spiraling through space.

A solar system is made up of everything orbiting a sun/star.  Ours is huge at 3 billion miles from the sun to Neptune, others are more compact, but the key is there are billions of solar systems in a galaxy and billions of galaxies in the Universe…

This size and scope is really incomprehensible and that’s what I want you to experience.

Awe.  Wonder.

And then…Only once in a million million, scientists have conjectured, a planet has the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it.

And we’re all living on the only known one.

Which is pretty crazy.

What else is pretty crazy?

Being born… 

Every single one of our ancestors, for as long as humans have been around, had to be in the exact spot at exactly the right time for us to even be here.  Not one missed step, not one distraction; every single pair of our ancestors had to meet and mate in exact, perfect order.

That calculation, with all things being perfect, computes the chance of any of us even being born is one in 400 trillion.

The miraculous births of Henry and myself happened 29 years and 9 months apart and we met because of that synchronous, wrong number text I sent on June 29, 2012.. that Henry answered.

Meeting was one thing, how did we even consider a relationship, much less stay together?

The way we were raised, the music we listened to, common viewpoints, love of adventure, each of us unconventional enough our age difference didn’t matter, all contributed to us moving into a relationship that only a very few would even consider.

The eclipse…

Awe and wonder, curiosity, fascination, joy, love, are feelings I experience when pondering life in the Universe, kidney transplants and total solar eclipses. It’s going deeper than math and science could ever explain.

Henry and I were ready to break up in the days leading up to the 2017 eclipse.  But that shared, magical experience impacted us so strongly, we stayed together.

Because of that life-changing eclipse, I knew this time was going to be intense.

The Pink Floyd tribute band who’d been playing all afternoon, finished “Eclipse,” the last song from The Dark Side of the Moon album about 3 minutes before totality.  I’d started crying as soon as I saw the moon begin its journey across the front of the sun. I was shedding serious tears as the band played their last notes because I love that album SO much and getting to hear it live as part of our second total solar eclipse was precious.

Looking up through the special glasses or taking them down, glancing around as the moon crept closer and closer to totality, seeing the weird color surrounding us.  My heart started beating faster and faster as the sun was diminished to the tiniest sliver.

And then suddenly it was dark through the glasses.

The eclipse was total.

We, along with our 200 new best friends, screamed and clapped.   Crickets were chirping, the wind blew cold and I took off my eclipse glasses to witness the 360 degree sunset, the porch lights coming on at the nearby houses.  The hush.  Now all of us were silent, speechless..

The utter joy, wide-eyed wonder, and a profound humbleness of feeling the awe of being alive and witnessing something so profound; well, all I could do was continue to cry from utter delight..

Watching the perfect synchronization of the moon sliding across the face of the sun ready to block out all the light of something 400 times its size, is what started me on the path of writing this; where science, synchronicity and spirituality connect in my world.

The odds…

I was sobered by the enormity of us even being born, meeting because of an errant text, falling in love and having Henry’s kidney be a match for me.

What are the odds I wondered?

I asked a mathematician if there was a way to figure them out.

One in a billion was the result of his calculation.

Stopping to think about the lottery I won to have been born at all, to live on the only planet we know of in the Universe with the most exquisite representations of nature, to experience the perfection of the lining up of a planet, its moon and the sun, and then to be told the life I’m living with Henry is one in a billion!!!

There’s a lot of zeros in this post.  Infinitesimal things to be aware of and to ponder.

So, I hope you will remind yourself as often as you can that your existence is nothing less than an absolute miracle, consider organ donation and by all means, figure out how you can experience a total solar eclipse.

https://www.space.com/next-10-years-solar-eclipses-2026-to-2034