On The Path

The other day I heard this story about how when a woman becomes pregnant, cells from the fetus get into the woman's bloodstream. Scientists drew blood from women in their study group and found fetal cells in all of their blood. What's strange is that these fetal cells stick around for a long, long time in the mother's body, up to forty years after pregnancy. And each pregnancy results in these cells getting in, regardless of the outcome of the pregancy- stillbirth, abortion, doesn't matter- the baby's cells are going to keep floating around in the mother's body for the rest of her life.

The other thing they found was in studying women with active disease processes, such as liver cancer. When they did biopsies of the liver tissue, they found a high concentration of these fetal cells had attached to the liver and were actively repairing the damage being done by the disease. And wherever they looked at the disease process, the scientists found these fetal cells at work.

This seems too beautiful to believe, and it seems to be correct.


This story is the kind of thing that jumps out at me all the time of late. Despite all the horrors that threaten to destroy us, love is at work in the tiny mechanisms of the universe.

The Holy Grail of physicists has been the discovery of a unified theory that would explain all the physical processes of our universe. Strong and weak electromagnetic force, gravity...

love?


If you dug down into the center of my being you'd find my heart. And if you took me apart down to the quantum level, would you find love as the glue that binds my soul to the machine?


I think so. I really do.



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It is easy every day to lose sight of what's important and we should make a concious effort to remind ourselves that we are all playing a very serious, very fun, very dangerous game here. And that, like a game, there is a time for it to be over. It isn't a regimented game like football or baseball, with those kinds of rules, but more like the games you played as a child in your neighborhood. A pick-up game of freeze tag or kick the can, where you join in the game already in progress, and you play your heart out, running, freezing, laughing and crying. The sun sinks toward the horizon and the first stars come out but you pay it no heed. One by one mothers come to their doorways and call in your friends, who veer off from the game and run homeward, to a place of light and warmth and love.

You'll be called home soon, too.


So run your little heart out while you can.



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Tag, you're it.



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