"There is no instinct like that of the heart." — Lord Byron

A thick frost glazed the sea grass this morning—the sun luminous on the horizon highlighting the tiny, white ice crystals formed in the night, drenched in moonlight.

It isn’t snow, though. I’ve been checking the forecast for weeks, hoping for a shower of white to sweep across the landscape like a billowy curtain closing out the grey limbo that hovers between Autumn’s festival of color and winter’s achromatic stillness.

In a season that invites such busyness, it seems that snow has a way of landing like a gentle palm—holding down the corners of us—and directing us to our beating hearts, right there within, a palpable reflection of our breath and being.

I listened to an interview recently of an anesthesiologist who wrote a memoir about his experiences in the operating room. He spoke of witnessing the human heart for the first time and the impact it had on him. The interviewer expressed her distress in the prospect of being exposed so intimately to how consistently the heart must do its job.

I find comfort in coming back to the knowledge of our heart’s steady rhythm and it’s reminder of the tightrope that hangs taut between our to-do lists and life’s potent fragility.

There was a leaf caught in my windshield wipers on the way to tennis lessons. At just four o’clock in the afternoon the dark was being drawn like a shade, the rain coming down steadily. I said to my boys that I would remove it when we arrived. I promptly forgot. We noticed it again as we were driving home. It became a challenge wondering how long the leaf could hold on.

A week later, the leaf has become, our leaf. We’re wondering if it might stay with us through the coming tumultuous elements—through the slush and snow. It miraculously made it through a car wash. It is strangely connecting to discuss the leaf stuck in the windshield wiper—giving us a break from the normal pressure around, “how was school?” I see that our scrappy stowaway has grown dry and rounded. There is a little hole on one side of it. I wonder how much longer it will be there.

A friend once said I have a soundtrack for every part of my day. I sometimes put on yogic, kirtan music in the evenings. It acts like a steady pulse beneath the ruckus of two energetic brothers unwinding like spinning tops let loose after a long day of containment.

On one such evening, I put a pot of water on the stove and dropped in two eggs to boil for lunches. I loaded the dishwasher and walked Adrian upstairs to his bath. Jonah went alone to my bathroom where he gets ready for bed by himself now. I admired Adrian’s display of animals lined up on the side of the tub—there was a hippo, a cheetah and a plethora of other animals, a testament to his ability to elicit a “yes” to more of anything.

He told me he’d divided the animals into girls and boys and I asked how he could tell the difference. He explained, “I made them alive,” so of course, he knew which was which.

For a change we decided to read picture books before sleep instead of our regular chapter book and the three of us piled together on one bed—our backs against the wall, legs propped out in front of us. Jonah played with the hair beneath my ponytail that had fallen to my neck. Adrian nibbled on apples.

The door to the room was closed, any tension from the day having fallen away.

And like always when I am engaging with them—beneath nearly every interaction—I was imagining that somehow our time together was filling every vein of them—every single pore of them—with the boundless love and hope I feel for them.

Even as I read, there was an alternate story playing out in my head—my attention weaving a root system inside of them, vast and steadying and strong—capable of keeping them safe and upright in this capricious world.

Suddenly, we were startled out of the bubble of our togetherness by a very loud sound—almost as if something large had dropped or maybe even popped. It stopped our reading in its tracks and we looked at each other in wonder. We almost decided to ignore the sound thinking that, in fact, something large had toppled over and I could check it out later.

Then I caught a whiff of something burning and I suddenly remembered. The eggs! I had dropped them into the pot, intending to go back down shortly to turn off the water and let them sit. I had forgotten about them completely.

We ran downstairs and found that the water had boiled down to nothing and one of the eggs had exploded—pieces of shell and cooked egg were scattered across the kitchen island and the floor. I ran and turned off the stove. The yogic chanting music was the backdrop to this messy scene.

It didn’t take me all that long to clean up the scattered pieces and thankfully there was no real damage—even, surprisingly, to the pot I had been cooking in.

Jonah lit a stick of the awareness incense in the green box to cover up the burning smell. Adrian had calmly found a book with colorful drawings and had sprawled out on the floor to look at it.

I noticed that my heart was beating wildly. If I had put my hand to my chest, I could have felt it thumping. There it was—doing its job—mirroring the narrative of my life and drumming out the measure of surprise.