I've had a lot of amazing luck in recent weeks, receiving amazing gifts, which then was followed by some annoying luck which sometimes goes with gifts, because that's life.

I remember three years ago that I was just scrambling to find a place to stay for Labor Day weekend, and somehow ended up standing atop a mountain at the center of Yosemite Park, in the middle of a two week period of being employed yet homeless.

So this weekend I was blessed to watch a sunrise on my favorite lake, and then, on back to back nights, listen to the most beautiful music in the world... on a classic 160 GB iPod... in a canoe... on the water... gazing up at the crystal clear Milky Way in awe and astonishment.  I've been blessed to do that many times, but I haven't had a full iPod in 18 months, or an mp3 player in a year, so the holy peak of evolution, listening to whatever song you like wherever you like, had been out of reach for two seasons at the lake.  I learned to put only the most important songs on the little 2 GB nano my friend let me have last year when my classic passed on, and to simply enjoy the sounds of the waves when that one didn't last, but man oh man, music and the cosmic symphony playing together in harmony is a supreme experience of the highest order.

You can probably guess some new songs I enjoyed on the water for the first time, because they were released this year (and yes, they were truly sublime, so I'll talk about them more some other time).

1 of my favorite new experiences of star vibration came through a very old song that I was happy to discover while raiding my parents' CD collection this spring: Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring: Doppio Movimento" performed by Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic Orchestra.  "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free..."  I suppose a purist would enjoy the universe without headphones and a music player, but then they wouldn't get the message.  What a paradox...