Cosmic Blessings

     

      Cosmic activity brightens my day in October when cosmos, the flower of the month for October, blooms profusely in my garden.  The universal predictability of the movements of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars inspired the name of the flower cosmos with it's predictably uniform petals. The hot pink cosmos tilting in a breeze against the dark blue shimmering pot seemed like the streak of a comet in a shining cobalt sky.  The sighting was predictable and still breathtakingly unexpected.  Cosmic luck.  Gary first planted our cosmos in a long narrow bed.  He nurtured them into profuse blooming by the best way to grow these flowers, withholding water until they begin to droop and trimming them back for a final profuse push of blooms.  A cosmically predictable event.

     I have grown cosmos now like Gary had done for a number of years following the gardening tradition of the Spanish monks who named the flower.  The word cosmos has come to have meanings tied to both the universe and to spiritual matters.  Cosmic luck circumnavigates the two.  I plant those cosmos.  They will grow and breezes will move them in delicate ways.  That I happened to be sitting in a pathway weeding and caught sight from a low angle of a single cosmos streaking across the dark glazed surface is the luck.  The spiritual part comes from the beauty of the flower and the satisfaction of being present.  That is cosmic luck.  Cosmic blessings.

      Young children believe that the moon follows them from room to room or over their shoulder while they ride in an automobile.  Their misconceptions are seemingly understandable and maybe not so different from erroneous thoughts of adults.  I unfailingly catch myself believing that cosmic luck follows me.  This isn’t voodoo magic or silliness.  Life is so often predictable and at the same time circled by universally fortuitous and unexpected events.  If I am here in October, the cosmos will bloom for me and the moon will cross my sky.  Since rarely do a few days pass without some pleasingly unexpected, but somewhat predictable event occurs, I would say that my life feels regularly cosmically blessed.

    I find that such simple things please me like the moon during an eclipse, the beauty of a pile of multi-colored peppers or a sunset with the appearance of a tractor unexpectedly blowing a cloud of dust off to the east across the photo.  With time on my hands I can have an intentional willingness to be present to appreciate the unexpected.

      I stood in line waiting to order a cup of soup yesterday at the Great Pacific Restaurant in Pendleton.  I came eye-to-eye with a sales rack of Cosmic Cowboy Coffee-dyed Brown Socks for $12 a pair.  Cosmic!  I am writing about cosmic!  Someone had maybe noticed those softly-colored brown coffee stains on their mother's lace tablecloth and clutching the memory into adulthood thought up with the idea to dye socks with coffee and sell them to coffee-drinking cowboys.  A cosmic shift from the white socks of engineers to the brown coffee-stained boot socks.  Innovations and inventions are ideas incubated between the predictable and accidental cosmic shifts in the mind.  I could hardly resist not buying a pair.  Maybe they would make me into a cowboy.  Ha, I would like that!

     Cosmic blessings.  I am trying to tell you that joy is mostly in little things.  I can give you examples like waking up seemingly at the precise moment that a flock of magpies slant across the window, shifting a rug under a chair and spying that little red straw that has gone missing for months that makes the can of WD40 spray into crevices (last seen in my car so ever long ago), crossing the path of an old friend only days before thinking of them and certainly the most universal sign of cosmic blessings getting the parking space in front of the door.  Children eventually grow up and learn that the moon circles the earth not them.  Adults grow up learning that science and math can make precise predictions and yet life is unpredictable.  Cosmically blessed.