What's the Point?
11:56 pm. The dark zone - - of oblivion. It's still yesterday, it's not tomorrow yet. Cold and pitch black dark, not even the wee hours. Timeless and tentative, like infinity, or eternity: this must be what purgatory would be like if it weren't nonsense. No nap Friday afternoon, hopelessly dozed off about five-thirty, so to bed, awake again at eleven-ten and up for hot & black decaf coffee, a bit of cheese from TJ's, a browse of email, news, and opinion, and these little stars staring at me. All they do is look at me, stare expectantly. Maybe they think I'm their mama. "Did you bring us anything?"
No, I didn't, go back to sleep, you guys.
Next to them, the dusty miller, gray bluish-green. Next to the dusty miller a lily that may soon shoot up a long green stem topped with a huge red blossom.
Next to the lily the Christmas cactus is coming into its own, loaded with red buds, three of which are already opening into flowers.
What's life all About, and what's its Point? I think it's About noticing what's around me, caring for it, and worrying about things beyond my control. Like it or not, its Point is the same as that of every other living thing, animal or plant, to continue the species.
What an interesting universe. Are there others out there? Probably, but not likely like us even though our images of extra terrestrials is inevitably anthropomorphic, even our mental image of a creating god, Daniel's Ancient of Days, an old man with white hair, and walking in the garden in the cool of the day; even though John said Jesus said God is Πνεῦμα, Spirit. We imagine everything as being like us, but it isn't necessarily so that life beyond Earth is in human form. I remember a Star Trek episode in which everyone aboard was reverting into their species' origin, and someone reported to Captain Kirk that Mr Spock, the emotionless Vulcan with pointy ears, was "reverting into a giant arachnid", an image that has stayed with me and visited me in dreams.
It's pretty late, you know, not only by the sun and the clock, but for me, in all sorts of ways.
On another scale, life's Point is to be available to others to love and be loved.
T