1000 gifts

I've been reading One Thousand Gifts over the past few weeks.  I first discovered the book after seeing a link for a youtube video on Kim Scowden's facebook profile.  Here's the link.  I attempted to write down the words she was saying:

She isn’t 24 hours old yet.  Still that heaven scent upon her skin.

When I pull her close and whisper right into her, whisper into her the meaning of life, the one thing she needs to know before she’s as old as I am and messed up as much as I have:

Moments, I tell her this

Moments, this is all we have

Microscopic, fleeting moments

Her eyelashes flutter in dreams, and I wonder how many moments of my life my eyes been open but I’ve been rushing, racing, sleeping right through.

How many of the popsicle days and run and twirl and spin days, how many of the moments of melting ice cream and crazy laughter, dangling bare feet and the setting sun igniting the wonder of now.

Someone wake me up to the beating of wings and splashing of water, the setting of fog at twilight, the way the leaves and the childhood slip away in the woods torched away with the summer.

I want to tell her this: you have got to figure out a way to stay fully awake.

Time’s blurring by, and everyone’s slipping past, and how do we wake to the moments?  How do we stop living like life is an emergency, something to be sped through?  Life is not an emergency.

How do we start believing that life can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried, a bubble held in awe.  How do we stop wolfing life down because life is our only dessert, too brief, too sweet, and too delectable to hurry?

To live like a boy I once knew who paused between bites to wiggle his loose tooth and say, “Mommy, I love you.”

And all this, all these moments, all these are for you.  Isn’t that the voice we have to learn to hear, the voice that is telling you that the earth under you and the rain over you and all the stars spinning  around you, this is for you.

Your true love’s smile, a nap, and a patch of light, the whirl of bike spokes, and the wild rose on the sill, and that one great puff of the flickering candles.  These are all for you.  What if we really figured it out?  That gratitude for the seemingly small and insignificant, this is the seed that plants the giant miracle in the midst of it all.

So count the ways he loves, 1000 more, never stop so that when you wake in the morning you can’t help but to unfold your hands to the heavens, and though you grieve, and though you wonder, though the world is ugly it is beautiful, and though time moves on its moments are holy, and though the planet spins a blur you can slow, and you can wake, and you can trust, and you can pay attention to the moments with this offering of thanks because this is how you live this life well, receiving each moment for what it really is: holy, ordinary, amazing grace, a gift.