Existence
I was reading Lafcadio Hearn and was recollecting back to one late night’s walk this past winter. The air was cold and dry and the sky cloudless and moonless with bright stars piercing the sky like bright shiny nail heads. Above me were the familiar shapes of Orion, The big dipper, Cassiopeia, Taurus, the Pleiades. These constellations sat lower on the horizon as I thought back to my younger days in Flagstaff and remembered looking at them on many a similar night so many years and miles away. In the moment I was struck with a sense of connectedness not just with my old hometown and my youth but with everything. It was as if my mind, for a moment, expanded and took in everything. Rather than being terrifying or overwhelming it was calming and satisfying. Then as quickly as it came in a few minutes the feeling was gone. I have returned to the same place at a similar time of night and gazed at those same heavens and have not felt moved in the same way. Still, I feel reassured that I can look up and see those same constellations and feel that no matter how my circumstance has changed I am still here on this same blue globe.
More recently another moment came when I was watching Brian Cox’s
series Universe on the BBC. In the third episode he discusses the history and
future of our galaxy. While I have never been a fan of his delivery, I
appreciate what he is trying to do and the science and CGI are fascinating. In fact,
this episode has a CGI section that seems surprisingly disconnected from the
narration. I found myself so involved with the disconnect and trying to
reconcile what I was hearing with what I was watching I had another epiphany.
The scene (shown below) is a view from a very old planet we know
about called ‘Kepler 444 f’. Kepler 444 f is old enough to have witnessed the
collision of the galaxy Gaia Enceladus with our galaxy some 11 billion years
ago. I the midst of the graphics of this simulated view I felt weirdly
comfortable to understand how deep time was and will be and how my existence is
so short within in that span. I say weirdly because I find it difficult to
explain. This vast unfathomable span of time can be terrifying or perhaps cause
one to understand how small we are on this galactic scale and that for all the importance
we place on our lives that we are in an exceedingly small sliver. Why did this engender
a sense of connection and wholeness rather than terror, discomfort, or destitution
I cannot fathom but there it is. A strangely spiritual moment.
BBC Universe - Series 1_ 3. The Milky Way_ Island of Light —Kepler 444 f
…after the mountains have melted like wax in the heat of a
world's dissolution—it is impossible to regard the theory of transmigration as
a mere fantasy. Each particle of our flesh has lived before our birth through millions
of transmigrations more wonderful than any has dared to dream
of; and life-force that throbs in the heart of each one of has throbbed
for all time in the eternal metempsychosis of the universe. Each atom of our
blood has doubtless circulated, before our very civilization commenced. through
the veins of millions of living creatures—soaring. crawling, or dwelling in the
depths of the sea; and each molecule that floats in a sunbeam has, perhaps.
vibrated
to the thrill of human passion. The soil under my foot has lived and
loved: and Nature, refashioning the paste in her awful laboratory into new
forms of being, shall make this clay to live and hope,
and suffer again. Dare I even whisper to you of the past
transformations of the substance of the rosiest lips you have kissed. or the brightest
eyes which have mirrored your look? We have lived innumerable lives in the
past; we have lived in the flowers, in the birds, in the emerald abysses of the
ocean;—we have slept in the silence of solid rocks, and moved in the swells of
the thunder-chanting sea;---we have been women as well as men;—we have changed our
sex a thousand times like the angels of the Talmud; and we continue the
everlasting transmigration long after the present
universe has passed away and the fires Of the Stars have burned themselves
out. Can one know these things and laugh at the theories of the East?'
--Lafcadio Hearn ‘Two Years in the French West Indies’
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