Love What’s Yours

August 8, 2021

I watch parents holding hands of young children heading on and off the beach while I walk with children taller than me, deciding on destinations together. Children grow and we expand.

My oldest will be headed to college in a year. It’s hard to imagine not knowing the comings and goings, the kitchen table talks, the meals, the chatter. So love what’s yours. Love what comes to you and like the tide when it is time for them to pull from shore, know they will return. These children belong to tomorrow, to a world beyond us, their destiny, their dreams. We are merely the safe keepers, at times of secrets, or favorite foods, how to slice their sandwiches when toddlers, or passcodes as teens.

We stopped to watch the sunset over the water our last night at the beach. The couple beside us told us they had been there every night the entire week and finally the perfect sunset arrived. The sun descends in one stage of life and rises in the next. This is how life moves. The tides pull, the seasons cycle, children grow and move like life.

Years ago at the American Museum of Natural History in New York my children and I sat reclined in the planetarium during Journey to the Stars while Whoopi Goldberg narrated celestial history. And while I remember nothing of the planets, the stars and galaxies, all I recall is that we are made of star dust. We are formed of sea and star. The same ratio of salt in our blood to the ocean, ratio of water to earth. Composed of star dust the universe breathes in us, we exhale light, we carry galaxies.

We are all stars orbiting one another.

There is a rhythm to the movement, an order to the growth. And so love what is yours. Love the breakfasts, and the bus stops, the sidelines, picnics on the beach, all the ‘don’t forgets’ and ‘did yous’…. Love them all. Children expand and recede from shore. And what recedes returns, for love always returns to love.

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