That's how I know.

There is a song by one of my very favorite artists in the world...India Arie....it's called God is Real. It so perfectly encapsulates everything I feel about Nature being the visible face of God. I remember the first time I heard this song. I happened to stumble across the new album India had released that had this track on it. I was just busting at the seams with excitement when I paid for it and walked out to my car. Never in my life had I been more excited about having a CD player in my car than I was at that moment. I put it on and jammed every song. Every song infiltrated my pores and resonated within my core. And then, this track came on and I was just forever changed. I felt this sensation at my toes start tingling and causing my toes to feel as though they were throbbing and that sensation traveled little by little all the way to the tips of my fingers and to the split ends of my hair ....and I felt like I had been electrified back to life, infused with a spirit and a message that was just undeniable. I had never felt more connected to a set of lyrics partnered with some beautiful melody.

The sweetest honey to the brightest flower
The largest planet to the smallest atom
Snowflakes and the bird kingdom
Smaller thatn the eye can see bigger then the mind can conceive

Heard a man on the radio today
(spoken)i mean I’m not going to believe in anything that I can’t see and i’ve
Been through a lot of hardships in my life ya know ya know in my life
Must confess I disagreed with what he had to say
How he could he not believe that God is real
I don’t understand how
He could feel that way

When there’s earth, air, water, and fire
So many different flowers
Sunshine and rain showers
So many different crystals
And hills and volcanoes

Chorus
That’s how I know that God is real
All of this is not by chance
That’s how I know that God is real
All of this is not by chance
That’s how I know that God is real
I know this is not by chance
That’s how I know that God is real
That’s how I know that God is real

In st. lucia I jumped in the water
(spoken)it was like I was seeing it for the first time. it literally changed
My life.
For the first time I understood it’s power
As I swam I was cleansed
If I had any doubts
This experience cleared them
Now I know for sure that God is real
I know that it’s the truth
By the way it feels

Cause I saw starfish and sponges
Fish shaped like trumpets
So many different colors
I stayed out there for hours and I only saw a fraction of a fraction of the
Deepest of the deep of the great blue wide
It brought a tear to my eye

We’re made of the same stuff
As the moon and the stars
The oceans saltwater just like my tears are
You feel me
The sunrises and sets everyday without fail

When people say they need "proof" of Jehovah's existence, I laugh. I laugh and I feel a bit sad. There are two things I KNOW, I FEEL are real life proof of Him. Nature and The Human Body. I am belittled by Nature's Fury and all it is capable of. I look up at the sky and I can't help but feel this infinite sense of wonder. I stand in the rain and feel it beat against my skin and renew it with the essence of Earth, I stand and watch an ant carry a leaf 200 times it weight and size, I am humbled by phototropism, cellular respiration, and deciduous trees that soak up the chlorophyll in the winter and spit it back out in spring, I just can't help but feel when I see all these things this overwhelming sense of .....well....I don't know....something so much Greater than ourselves. So much Bigger. And as though looking into the night sky and drowning in it's cosmic and celestial wonder and feeling this tug at my soul as though I were bound by a rope around my waist that was being pulled into a galactic maelstrom of a black hole wasn't enough to make me believe, then there's the Human Body.
I've always been in awe, in utter, unequivocal, irrevocable and profound awe of what our bodies are capable of. I mean we can carry within us the Divine power to heal ourselves, to fight infection, to regenerate, to reproduce, and to do things no other species are capable of. I HAVE always had a fascination with medicine and all the miracles and intricacies of the human body it has exposed and introduced me to. I remember being in my Anatomy and Physiology class in college and being moved to tears when Dr. Mishra would go on and on about how incredible and magnificent we were. How every thing was symbiotic and nothing could work quite as well without some other thing going on. How we were mere puzzles and everything had its place and reason and we worked together consciously and unconsciously....voluntarily and involuntarily to maintain a most magical machine. I have never felt that more vehemently than when I wake up next to you and watch you sleep. I think about the fact that you started your life off as a little traveling liquid that found something about me favorable enough to knock you into existence. Then within me you grew day by day into a little person with your own set of everything. And then you were here. And when you were first born you were so unsure with your movements. So hesitant. You'd lay on the changing table and have these sporadic bouts of appearing like you were falling off The Empire State building. Like you needed some reassurance that I'd be here to catch you if you fell. And every month you surpassed some developmental milestone and my belief was deeper and deeper. I watch in amazement how you manipulate your little fingers to bring things to where you want them. I watch you bring your feet up to your mouth to explore these amazing new things you just discovered. I crack up as I watch you learn on your own that if you bite your fingers, it hurts. You went from needing my hand behind your neck at all times to holding up your little head all on your own....I've watched you go from comatose to "God why can't you just keep still for a second?!!" I pondered over your health because you slept all day and stayed awake all night and now beg for a nap longer than thirty minutes. Your body has settled into it's circadian rhythms without a bit of help from me. You were a thought and because of what we are capable of you lived inside of me for nine months and now you are real and every day I am fortunate enough to witness how amazing it is to watch a body develop and unfold right before my very eyes.
I am truly blessed to be able to understand and appreciate how amazing we are and how amazing it is to be able to appreciate the world around us. And when I am asked how I know that God is real.....my answer is not a difficult one to conjure....it's quite simple.
 I wake up, I live, I have you, that's how I know.

No such thing as useless.....

My beautiful chunky little warrior!
You should know that your mother absolutely loves random bits of knowledge. As if the wonderful and extensive and quite vast array of knowledge that the world or books gives me wasn't already delicious enough ......I'm blessed to have the wonderful world of weird and wacky and some may say useless trivia. I have to confess I don't believe ANY knowledge is useless. Goodness no! So I wanted to share some of my favorite tidbits with you....

1. Bananas are herbs - Although referred to as banana trees, they are not trees at all but a perennial herb. Its trunk is not a true one, but many leaves tightly wrapped around a single stem which emerges at the top as the fruit-bearing flower stalk.
2. Dr. Seuss actually pronounced Seuss such that it sounded like Sue-ice.  
3. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand draw with the other at the same time.
4. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand. One should carry a stout pole while traveling in quicksand country...when placed under one's back, it helps one to float out of the quicksand. 
5. Laser is actually an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emissions of Radiation."
6. There are enough blood vessels in your body to wrap around the Earth almost three times.
7. Lightning is three times hotter than the surface of the sun.
8. If you unfolded your brain it would cover an entire ironing board.
9. The average four year old asks 437 questions a day!( WOW! I can't wait to answer them or look for the answer to all of them.)
10.  Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day. (So we will always make each other laugh mami, so we will both be healthy, beautiful women!)
11. If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons. (It's a good thing to know in case we ever need to build a bridge .... huh?)

Don't you worry my baby girl! There is so much more where this came from. And here is hoping you are a big a nerd as your mami! I love you and sweet dreams!