Look
what happens to the scale
when love
holds
it.
It stops working.
Kabir
Yesterday was a day of following numbers to get to one place to another. They were random numbers – floor eleven, bus twenty-three, train seven, gate ten, flight forty, parking space nineteen, and finally the option of choosing which number highway to follow home. During the day, I walked, sat, and moved past hundreds of others navigating their own numerical grid of life.
As the day had reached nighttime, I was at the crossroad where there was the choice of which roadway for the drive home. My eyes automatically glanced upward above the street to check the color on the stoplight. They were met with a radiant smile looming in the sky over one of the two roads. For the first time that day, I heartily laughed, mostly at myself and modern conditioning to choose and follow the numbers. Yet, there in a single glance were the most timeless influences on and guides for our planetary moveability – the night sky with her stars and moon!
There was only one clear way to go, and that was to follow the light in the sky. It seemed within every curve of the road, the luminous crescent would once again appear in front of the car. Whenever the moon disappeared, I thought of the other humans I had passed within the day. Few of the situations allowed for a conversation beyond an “excuse me” or thank you,” and even so they felt alienating in part because the language itself implies a separateness between a you, and a me. That separateness is invisibly reinforced by the all the cards and gadgets that we carry in our pockets, each having a unique string of numbers.
Even more deeply tucked in our attitudes and sense of self would be the numeric imprints we had gathered along the way. Over the past five or six hundred years, human life has increasingly become run by and beholden to numbers. Grades, ratings on athletic and artistic accomplishments, quantity of friends, and size of portfolios would have sorted us out, or given us some inner navigational ranking, with some having more value than the others just because their numbers were higher.
Fortunately, the lights in the sky steadily invite us to remember what the ancients knew, and that is the largest number in life is non-existent. It is infinity, which cannot be added to or taken away from. It just is. Within infinity is everything, everywhere. It may be frightening to consider such vastness, yet innately we are more akin to that vastness than not. Perhaps the numbers give us some sense of permanence or security. Perhaps the numerical façade we love buffers and cloaks us from the fear of recognizing we are boundless, luminous beings shining as brightly as the sun and the moon. Even though we love numbers, we cannot eat or breathe them. They do give us the ground to walk on or the water to drink or bathe. They do not give us our sensory or emotional capacity to love or be loved, or to express reverence, appreciation, kindness, peace, justice, joy or any of the countless, sacred gems of living and being within this earthly community.
I continually am grateful to our nature kin, including the skyward ones, for showing me the way home. And, for their quiet reminders of how they continue to glow, blossom, grow, give, and receive without numbers. Please join me in letting them be beacons to helping us renew our connection and love for the immeasurable and unquantifiable.
Practice
This practice offers awareness of loving reverence
Prepare—
- Find a space where you can both move around and be comfortably seated.
- Please take a moment to skim this practice to get a general idea of its essence. Then, clear your space of all non-medical, digital devices, including the one with this practice, a smart watch, etc.. Place these devices in a separate room.
- Please trust your ability to be disconnected for a few minutes from a digital device.
- Remember you are full and complete without an external device.
- Once your space is cleared, move and/or shake out your body in way that is comfortable. Imagine you are releasing any of the stress that you might have accumulated in the last few hours. Remember to also release the muscles in your face and jaw.
Practice—
- Standing, imagine you are a sphere reaching into infinity in all directions.
- Imagine the core of your heart is at the center of that endless sphere, and that your arms extend from your heart.
- (For the following, please feel free to adjust this and the following movements to the comfort of your shoulders.)
- Symbolically reach in all directions, reach your arms:
- as high as you can overhead and pause for a moment. Offer gratitude and reverent appreciation for the vastness of space, the sky, moon, stars, air and all the visible and invisible beings within our planetary atmosphere.
- alongside your body with your fingertips reaching downward. Pause with a feeling of reverence offer thanks for the expanse of the earth, mountains, the soil, trees, plants, animals and all forms of existence around the globe. Also offer reverent gratitude for all the waters, the rivers, streams, lakes, aquafers and oceans.
- at shoulder height to your sides. Pause, offer gratitude to the directions of south and north. Invite a sincere, prayerful sense of kindness, patience, compassion and peace flowing from your heart-center through your fingers for health and safety for all beings.
- again, at shoulder height toward the front with one arm and the other back. Pause while offering gratitude for the directions of the east and west. Invite a sense of pure love flowing from the earliest beginnings of earth and all ancestors into the future.
- in any direction that is comfortable, slowly spin around clockwise three times. Invite a sense of the infinite presence of pure and lovingness journeying through your feet, fingertips and crown of your head from your heart-center. If you have a particular faith or connection with the divine, perhaps bring in that prayerful sensibility.
- Then, gathering the infinite sphere into your palms, bring your hands together in front of your heart center and slightly bow your head. Pause with a sense of the sacred, loving presence of the entire universe eternally shining within the core of your heart.
Transition Back into Your Day—
- Come to a seated position. With still a sense of a sacred presence within the core of your being, take the fingertips of one of your hands and lightly touch your senses, which are the gateways of existence and communication.
- For example, lightly touch your nose, mouth, eyes, ears, belly, top of your head and then touch your thighs with a feeling of that touch reaching to both feet.
- Bring both hands together in front of your heart again with awareness that every touch, word, glance and attentive listening is the grace of living sacredness.
- Rest your palms in your lap and sit quietly for a few moments.
- When you are ready, return to your day.
This poem appears in Mala of the Heart: 108 Sacred Poems, page 34, edited by Ravi Nathwani and Kate Vogt and published by New World Library. Photo by Ashwini Monty on Unsplash.
H E A R T H is posted each new and full moon. KateVogt©2026.
Upcoming Classes: “Transcendental Love” (in-person at College of Marin, Kentfield) and “Ecological Roots of Spirituality” (online). For more information and to register, click on this link and scroll down on the left hand side to the “literature/humanities” category.
