Dust
For Dust Thou Art,
and unto Dust Shalt Thou Return
From readings, contemplations, thoughts, I especially like the poem Professor Finlay, friend Doctor Dan of GCSC, emailed to the EfM group after their Wednesday evening gathering. Mentor long-gone-emeritus, blessed I am to be included in their group communications, grateful to be retained and not scratched as the outsider I am now and have been since Ray Wishart took over our three EfM groups in October 2010 upon my heart event. Truth, it was time anyway, my having been an EfM mentor off and on since late 1980s when Pat Horn started our EfM group at Trinity, Apalachicola, then Arnold Bush again at HNEC in 2002 and on, overall stretching thirty years; and with refresher training visits to Sewanee, where the scenery is overwhelming, the mood intense, the university book store a wonder, and where lives suddenly change and are changed. Here’s Cardenal’s piece, which is imaginative, perhaps - - theocosmological (yes it is)
Ernesto Cardenal's
S T A R D U S T
What's in a star? We are.
All the elements of our body and of the planet
were once in the belly of a star.
We are stardust.
15,000,000,000 years ago we were a mass
of hydrogen floating in space, turning slowly, dancing.
And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.
Stars were born, grew, and died.
And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower
the way it looks now on a starry night.
Our flesh and our bones come from other stars
and perhaps even from other galaxies,
we are universal,
and after death we will help to form other stars
and other galaxies.
We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.
Where as the Big Bang, God who is Love (1 John 4:8) said let there be (Genesis 1:3) and it was so, and to dust shall we return (Genesis 3:19), were we given multiple chances at life on earth, next time I might be a cosmologist, astronomer, a meteorologist or — because my love and worry for my loved ones so obsessively and dotingly haunts, torments, consumes me — a cloistered monk -
or
a Navy pilot with the Blue Angels
https://www.youtube.com/embed/u4D0yx4DvBk?rel=0
Cardenal’s longterm prognosis and Thomas Hardy’s contemplation to Time about Dust, “By the Earth’s Corpse”
I
"O Lord, why grievest Thou? -
Since Life has ceased to be
Upon this globe, now cold
As lunar land and sea,
And humankind, and fowl, and fur
Are gone eternally,
All is the same to Thee as ere
They knew mortality."
II
"O Time," replied the Lord,
"Thou read'st me ill, I ween;
Were all THE SAME, I should not grieve
At that late earthly scene,
Now blestly past--though planned by me
With interest close and keen! -
Nay, nay: things now are NOT the same
As they have earlier been.
III
"Written indelibly
On my eternal mind
Are all the wrongs endured
By Earth's poor patient kind,
Which my too oft unconscious hand
Let enter undesigned.
No god can cancel deeds foredone,
Or thy old coils unwind!
IV
"As when, in Noe's days,
I whelmed the plains with sea,
So at this last, when flesh
And herb but fossils be,
And, all extinct, their piteous dust
Revolves obliviously,
That I made Earth, and life, and man,
It still repenteth me!"
And of our self-importance on earth, in our solar system, in the Milky Way Galaxy, among perhaps two trillion galaxies in this one universe of infinite multiverse possibilities. An the thought boggles the mind, then as J B Phillips keeps saying, Your God is Too Small.
DThos+ in Stoppage Time
