Eight

Eight.  I’ve always liked that number.  8.  Turn it sideways and it is infinity. Eight is said to be the first “free” number.  Eight is enough. The eight wonders of the world.  In numerology, my lucky numbers are 3 and 5 which add up to….8.  An octave has 8 major notes.  Spiders (and all arachnids) have 8 legs, and octopi (and their cephalopod relatives) have 8 “arms”.  Eight is considered a very lucky number in Chinese culture; a license plate that was solely the number 8 sold for $640,000 in Hong Kong.  And don’t forget that the Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 (local time) on the 8^th day of the 8^th month of 2008. Eight is the atomic number of oxygen. The Dharmachakra, a Buddhist symbol, has 8 spokes.  Ashtanga yoga, the lineage that I study, is known as “eight-limbed” yoga (“ashto”=eight).  In Wicca, there are 8 yearly festivals, considered spokes of the “Wheel of the Year”, and there are 8 trigrams in the Ba Gua of Taoism.  There are 8 beatitudes as taught by Jesus.  In computers, a byte is 8 bits. 

Now, one can be “behind the 8-ball”, and this is not a good place to be. On my keyboard, above the 8 is the asterisk. (The symbol that should be next to the names of Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire in the baseball statistical record, I might add).  The asterisk in all this is that yesterday I met with my oncologist, and got the results of a blood test, called a CA1-99, which measures cancer “markers”.  Normal ranges are from 0-37.   My test came back at 8.  A good, beautiful, healthy “low-normal” eight.  An eight that bought me four more months of freedom! Eight never looked so good.  Eight is enough.

Soon,

Swami bruce