Tag: Committee For A Bigger Universe

Transcendent Science and Knowery.

In the spirit…

… of its content, this might have been posted 12/28/6, the day I wrote and sent it to my coworkers. But it wasn’t:

Friends,

If you can imagine a universe-sized sponge made of galaxies surrounding bubble-like voids, congratulations: you’re hip to the current scientific model of the Big Picture.

We humans don’t always do too well with the Big Picture, though. Our tiny brains like to slice reality into assimilable, us-sized bites. Instead of Limitless Space, we distinguish between Here and There; instead of Eternity, we think about Then and Now. Sometimes, we even think about Later.

Every time our planet completely circles its star, many of us commit to doing (often changing) something as we travel the orbit to come. (That orbit doesn’t actually start on January 1st — that’s a date as arbitrary as the alphabet I’m using to type this email — but as the man draining the swamp said, “You have to start somewhere.”) If it’s your custom to do that, may you have the strength to live up to your commitments. If it’s also your custom to become frustrated with yourself a week later, take heart — it’s a big universe, with enough room to start over and enough time for patience.

Happy New Year, whenever it finds you.

37 Years Ago Today

“But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when
Time won’t drive us down to dust again.”
— Leslie Fish, Hope Eyrie

One of the most embarrassing things which ever happened to me was falling asleep for the 90 or so seconds surrounding one small step.

I was seven years old and living in middle-class Matawan, New Jersey. A precocious child, I’d been hard-bitten by the space-and-science-fiction bug; 2001 had blown my wee mind the previous year and infected me with star-pricked visions of silver and flame. There was NO WAY I wasn’t staying up to “watch those guys walk on the moon,” as I so often and loudly put it. My parents were pretty cool with the idea, and as the hour approached we ate McBurgers picnic-style on the living room floor.

The last thing I remember, Neil Armstrong was opening the Eagle’s metal mouth.

The next thing I remember, my mom was shaking me awake. “Honey! You missed it!” she said.

I think I cried for a week. (The trauma has leached from my mind the exact duration.) But ever since, whenever I look up at the moon (which is often) my eye automatically lands on the Sea of Tranquility.

“That’s where we first touched you,” I say to myself (and anyone within earshot).

Since then, albeit with with robot fingertips, we’ve touched Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan and the asteroid Hayabusa ; we’ve grabbed bits of the Sun, crossed its outermost echo and even marked a comet. And, please God, we’re just getting started.

Homo sapiens explorator. Cheers, mate.

Message From Beyond

NOT ALL MITZVOT TURN INTO ghost stories — but when doing holy work, it’s always a good idea to expect the unexpected.

Ann and I are members of the Sonoma County Chevre Kadisha, which literally means “holy fellowship;” it’s a centuries-old Jewish institution committed to preparing the dead for burial. Doing this is considered to be the most selfless of all mitzvot (commandments), partly because there’s no way the beneficiary can pay you back.

In 2002, we joined a crowd of about 50 at Cotati’s Congregation Ner Shalom where, over the course of an afternoon and under the tutelage of Rabbi Elisheva (Sachs) Salamo, we learned — as one participant put it — to “gift-wrap people for sending them back to God.” Continue reading “Message From Beyond”

Circlogics

Circles, by definition, have no ends — each is a continuous line which, as the philosopher Charles Fort tells us, “one measures … beginning anywhere.”

However, like life’s other complexities, not all circles conform to strict definition.

Consider: Earth’s orbit is (mostly) circular, yet because our planet’s rotation is tilted relative to its orbit, the perspective of us surface-dwellers reveals two distinct “ends:” At one, the daily cycle favors light; at the other, darkness. Both make for fine beginnings, even if today’s — which we Northern Hemispherites call “summer solstice” — may be too hot for anything other than thinking.

May the One Who keeps it all in motion favor our undertakings whenever we begin — and so on through their other end.

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