our Universe
In the predawn darkness, no thunder yet, but massive cloud lightning off to the west. High in the east, one of those fast twinkling stable satellites. Sometimes it's opposite 7H directly out over the Gulf of Mexico, which I don't like because I know it means They're Watching Me, whoever They are and whyever They're watching. I mean, why are They watching me, I'm innocent. Well, so to speak, at least compared to you.
It doesn't always happen because I don't always remember, sometimes I get distracted and the mind wanders; but when I'm up early and alone and my mind is on it, I do a bit of meditation. It doesn't always have to be the same, but one is with a four-step mantra, each beginning with "I" because it's me I'm wanting and allowing to change.
Another is with a mental picture of the Universe, looking at the edge of it from just outside of it. Which is not irrational, because if there was a Big Bang of a particle roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom that has been expanding ever since, there was a Before the Big Bang and there were and likely are any number of those particles, any number of ongoing Big Bangs, and any number of Universes. So, sometimes in meditating I position myself outside our particular Universe, at the edge as I say, and contemplate. Starting, I try to remember to look at the clock and let it go five minutes, but generally fifteen minutes goes by before I know it, notice it. This is fairly new with me, but had I started it sixty or seventy years ago life might have been quite different. Less fraught, that is to say.
That our Universe has an edge is not to say that it's flat, pancake-like: if the particle burst and expanded, it likely did so, and continues to do so, spherically, such that it has a ball shape. When I was twenty-eight and -nine and thirty, living high on a hilltop overlooking Tokyo Bay, and sitting outside into the wee hours with my telescope gazing into a clear sky with a billion stars overhead, in the daytime, weekends and after supper, I was reading astronomy books; and I remember reading an Einstein theory in which he said the universe is finite, and saddle-shaped, and that outside it is nothing, not even space. So I'm no Einstein, but I can only visualize "nothing, not even space" theoretically, not practically. Not actually. If I punch a hole in the edge of the universe, will it go flat like a punctured balloon, or will nothing, not even space, leak in like water coming through a dike with a hole in it, and ... what?
Second cup of black this early morning, the second one with two small chunks of that severely dwindled TJ cheese that I hope my Tallahassee daughter will replace when they come over Labor Day weekend.
Bought two pints of oysters yesterday, and three mullet. We don't fry, Linda bakes the mullet in the oven, not quite the same but more heart-healthy. I'd like to arrive at the fish market just as the mullet are brought in from the net, but these were not so, and I knew it but bought anyway: they were okay, in fact there's one side waiting to become my breakfast, good but not perfect. The oysters? Fresh, and perfect with added salt. I ate one pint yesterday, half before lunch while the mullet baked and half as my supper; and will eat the other today, maybe for lunch. What a great Universe.
RSF&PTL
T
It doesn't always happen because I don't always remember, sometimes I get distracted and the mind wanders; but when I'm up early and alone and my mind is on it, I do a bit of meditation. It doesn't always have to be the same, but one is with a four-step mantra, each beginning with "I" because it's me I'm wanting and allowing to change.
Another is with a mental picture of the Universe, looking at the edge of it from just outside of it. Which is not irrational, because if there was a Big Bang of a particle roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom that has been expanding ever since, there was a Before the Big Bang and there were and likely are any number of those particles, any number of ongoing Big Bangs, and any number of Universes. So, sometimes in meditating I position myself outside our particular Universe, at the edge as I say, and contemplate. Starting, I try to remember to look at the clock and let it go five minutes, but generally fifteen minutes goes by before I know it, notice it. This is fairly new with me, but had I started it sixty or seventy years ago life might have been quite different. Less fraught, that is to say.
That our Universe has an edge is not to say that it's flat, pancake-like: if the particle burst and expanded, it likely did so, and continues to do so, spherically, such that it has a ball shape. When I was twenty-eight and -nine and thirty, living high on a hilltop overlooking Tokyo Bay, and sitting outside into the wee hours with my telescope gazing into a clear sky with a billion stars overhead, in the daytime, weekends and after supper, I was reading astronomy books; and I remember reading an Einstein theory in which he said the universe is finite, and saddle-shaped, and that outside it is nothing, not even space. So I'm no Einstein, but I can only visualize "nothing, not even space" theoretically, not practically. Not actually. If I punch a hole in the edge of the universe, will it go flat like a punctured balloon, or will nothing, not even space, leak in like water coming through a dike with a hole in it, and ... what?
Second cup of black this early morning, the second one with two small chunks of that severely dwindled TJ cheese that I hope my Tallahassee daughter will replace when they come over Labor Day weekend.
Bought two pints of oysters yesterday, and three mullet. We don't fry, Linda bakes the mullet in the oven, not quite the same but more heart-healthy. I'd like to arrive at the fish market just as the mullet are brought in from the net, but these were not so, and I knew it but bought anyway: they were okay, in fact there's one side waiting to become my breakfast, good but not perfect. The oysters? Fresh, and perfect with added salt. I ate one pint yesterday, half before lunch while the mullet baked and half as my supper; and will eat the other today, maybe for lunch. What a great Universe.
RSF&PTL
T