To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings- it’s all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle……Albert Rubinstein

this finite heartbeat astounds in its graceful light, reaching toward the ungraspable….we cling, let go, cling again…..what is beyond this light anyway? and what is the light that warms us with love? and what is that darkness that drowns us in solemn doubt?

I think of the ancients ascribing thunder and lightning to godly feuds, and I smile. The need for explanation pulsates in us all. Now, with our understanding of Nature arguably better than our understanding of persons, Nature can take its place as a strange but wondrous given. The realization that I needn’t have answers to the Big Questions, needn’t seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany. I lie on my back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances, the impermanence, the fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high temperatures. I take in the abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress, me like Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not mattering because the words are so haunting. Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate…….Ursula Goodenough

hold the sky lightly

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

…Lao Tzu….trans. Stephen Mitchell