The sun was warm, the wind was cold and I was laying on my back on top of a grassy hill watching the clouds coalesce, drift, collide, and disperse, in their ceaseless, nebulous dance. I stared straight upward at the zenith of the sky as I had not done since I was very young, when I would lay in the back yard of my mother’s house and, looking up into the darkest center of the sky, and tracing a line down to the horizon, I had to wonder how anyone could have ever believed the earth was flat.

And then waves of frantic, energetic music swept across the square. A violin, with two deep beats of a bass drum punctuating at regular intervals. The kind of music which calls to attention anyone and everyone it reaches and demands that they be present in this moment and observe the visceral reality of it.  The kind of music which usurps your thoughts, the kind of beat which reigns your heart into step. I looked toward the sun and could almost feel my body being swung around it in space, as it has done nearly twenty seven times already since I emerged and began my observations, and as it will continue to do, after my observations have ceased, for such epochs as my mind will never be able to comprehend. Such lengths of time had passed before I began and such lengths will pass after I’m gone as to make my life, and this moment, seem so infinitesimally brief. I can not help but inhale the cool air, stretch my muscles and tendons, soak in the light of that beautiful and terrible source of all motion on the surface of this great ball of coagulated energy, and exhale a long slow sigh in the form of the deepest gratitude a mind can muster that I could be awake in this passing moment, in this ever changing place. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to believe that it would last forever.

And the music stops.