Once a year, there's a day when one aspect of the now is magnified, specifically about how it relates to another date: your birthday. Your birthday is a distant star, but you use that star to judge your appropriateness. You may notice some confidence and poise in some areas, and identify that as part of the blessing of this pole star,



Or maybe you notice aches and pains, nostalgia, or regret. But in a way, all of those things are the moving atmosphere above a deeper feeling of being. This is the other now. If you remember the way you felt standing on a beach as a child, or reading a favorite book, or maybe sitting in a drainage ditch to be close to nature. This is the center of the universe, and all the rest is a repetition of forms that all living things go through, or maybe the whole universe itself goes through this cycle of birth, life, and death.

And that's the other star in the distance: time of death, they call it. Do you fear it? Do you wait patiently for it? Do you think about it at all? Death is a kind of harvest. All the unanswered questions on your day of birth are now answered: who you would be, how you would behave at that critical juncture, how you would treat that person of no consequence, what you would fight for, whether you would fight at all, or let it be. It's all known then. So in this way, the now is oriented to what it could be, what it should be, whether your last thoughts will be of guilt or joy.

--thoughts from the bathtub