The Goose & The Garbage Truck

I heard a goose during my morning meditation today.
Her warm slow honking carried to me across the suburban distance. She was intermittently accompanied by a piercing power-saw from the neighbour’s yard.

Eventually the rainbow lorikeets joined in, then the garbage truck, and I wondered how I got so lucky to live in a place where strangers come to collect my rubbish, unbidden.

All these comings and goings of the world mingled with my own nearly-silent heartbeat.

This is the symphony of 7am on the summer solstice.

The word sol-stice literally means ‘the stopping of the sun’. Because it seems to pause (perhaps for a deep breath) before changing direction. But of course, WE are the ones who change direction. 

And I was so busy worrying about the evening news that I almost didn’t notice this remarkable marker between the longest day, and our passage back towards the season of more starlight.

Despite the beginning of our celestial dimmer switch, today I try to remind myself that the light of our local star is always still there. Regardless of which direction I’m facing. And I try harder to resist the temptation of getting swept onto a trajectory of inner darkness. 

Imminently, we will enter a phase of “holidays”, originally meaning ‘holy-days’. And what could be more holy than this great turning of the spheres?

In my moments of clearest perspective, I am wonderstruck by the forces that keep all these circles spinning around me, while I spin myself around on them. 

On these coming holy-days, may the sunlight remind you how mysterious and beautiful the rhythms we live by are. So that you can somehow hold the inevitable comings and goings of everything with lightness, and love.

And may the goose and the garbage truck teach you too, how to tune into the orchestra of the universe as it plays out the grand symphony of our lives.