God shed His grace
In my new and final retirement, I'm writing these +Time blogposts some days instead of most every day as, with a couple of breaks, I did from mid-October 2010. There are 4,923 posts, nearly one a day over more than fourteen years.
In what is becoming my Wilderness Time at this late decade of life, I'm Committing to less, Trying to say "No" more often, Seeking truth more conscientiously, Contemplating more, Thinking differently, Working at some sort of awkward and unpracticed morning meditation.
Meditation is work, it takes commitment, and I'm trying but taking care not to try very hard.
What do I do? Our regular bedtime is nine o'clock and I get up between two and three o'clock in the morning (making up for sleep loss with a two or three hour nap around six or seven AM most days).
Sometimes I deliberately go to bed later to try and force myself to sleep late and have the morning with Linda instead of rising way before dawn to face thinking Time alone. Usually that doesn't work, and I'm up way early with Time and a mug of hot & black. Coffee & Time. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Mornings before sitting in my office chair and starting to read or type, I sit in my easy chair and try to close my eyes and see what comes, while sipping the hot & black. To ignite that, I have an opening image that's already in mind.
It's a deep space image from the James Webb Space Telescope, that shows a tiny fraction of the night sky, distant galaxies among - - the latest growing estimate is perhaps two trillion galaxies in observable range of Earth (how many more far beyond our possible viewing range?, perhaps an infinite number).
A place of such incomprehensible vastness that someone has said everything is in the center of the Universe. Including Earth. Including me. I'm at the center of the Universe, even as the Milky Way galaxy, of which our solar system is a miniscule part, speeds away from all the other galaxies.
I do not do the common thing of meditating on "Why? Why am I? Why do I exist? Why am I HERE? Why here in this place and Time, at this precise moment of this one earthly human life?" That's been done, and being done.
Looking at the image, I simply contemplate that it's so. That this is Truth, the answer to Pilate's question. The smallness of my individual Being yet still part of Creation's vastness.
Some part of me will always be: dust I am, and to dust I shall return. When I as a person am no longer, my dust will go on as part of Creation. Dust that has always been. What I see of me is part of Time and space.
This is Truth.
Can I find in my seeking, that Whoever or Whatever jussively said "yeh-HI," and consented to the Big Bang actually cares about me, loves me, maybe even likes me?
I can imagine that, because the notion is no more outrageous than all the chaos and order that my dust and I are part of. In Time and space, a brief experiment to see how humans do? How are we doing? Maybe it's too early to say, because we are not finished evolving toward the godly image that we were created to become.
But we are evolving toward insanity where perhaps we will use Canadian and Greenland slave labor to rebuild Gaza and create the American Riviera on the eastern Mediterranean. For some Americans there will be free roundtrip flights there for annual vacations.
I can't wait to go.
Guantanamo? Never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine that there would be American concentration camps in my lifetime. Rounding up the social and political undesirables.
T89&c
