On the Eighth Day

It must have been a Monday. Once the second Monday rolled around, the endless cycles that have prevailed ever since were set in motion. Now everything was for a second time and people began to say, “I know that. Tell me something I don’t know,” as if knowing was in the mouth of the declarer and not in the eyes of the beholder.

The prime numbers, (1, 3, 5, 7 . . .) are divisible only by themselves and by 1). That’s in itself a good reason not to have 8-day weeks, which could be split into equal parts. There is a mysterious but quite palpable benefit in having a week of seven days; they cannot be split in half as is bound to happen to everything else, sooner or later.

There are also seven tones in the musical scale with which we often find ourselves humming along, reverberating within as the waves of sound cascade over us.

But there are eight tones in the scale as it begins again at a higher level. That allows the present to resonate with the past and makes it possible for our present state of being to set in motion a dream of transforming into who we want to be.

Perhaps that’s what the eighth day really means. It’s the day after. We’ve already had the Devine Creation, and here we are wandering in the darkness, not realizing that we too embody a creative spark. We treat ourselves as leftovers, cast by the wayside of a living flow that seems to have moved on without us.

Obliged to live in the shadow of this eighth day, we need to ground ourselves in appreciation and gratitude for what we have been given so that the waters of life (70% of our bodies, I’ve heard) can flow in unison with the great current that has cast us up upon the land. As the descendants of ocean beings, who must have been unsuccessful as ocean dwellers for us to have been left hobbling along on the hard plates of a still-flaming world, we now have a choice. Do we lament that we didn’t remain in the water, breathing through gills, our world illuminated as we glide along, beneath waves moving by on the bright surface overhead; or do we pull ourselves up on our vestigial fins and make the best of it?

We are not some hapless fish who has been given the task of being a “Good Steward”. It is not some alien species who are consigning our old cousins, the majestic whales and smiling dolphins, to their deaths on barren beaches, as they desperately try to escape the sonic depth charges going off in their brains.

No, that is us, the bipedal beings who crowd the surface of our world, dump plastic trash and toxic chemicals into the ocean home of fellow beings, and run scared before barren complexities that neglect the oneness of the Devine.

One, three, five, seven . . .
We count but do not notice
Today could be our last.