Startled by Existence

Apples am I eating , or -- A poem in which I give full vent to an insidious and raging vanity.

Note: this somewhat silly poem was triggered by the implications (and my brief foray) into naturalism. However, it might just as well celebrate digestion by design.

A.

Apples.

Red apples.

I am eating red apples!

R ed apples

Re da p p le s

                 Erd paples

               Apserd elp

Sa plede rpd   e!

Do you see me chew red apples?

Sapler

            Sap

                  S

M'mmm - Delicious!

Yes indeed, in apple crisp or fritter, apple sauce or pie,

I'll eat apples till I die!

So:

Apples to my clavicles,

Apples to my cones,

Apples to the red stuff

Hidden in my bones.

Apples to my glutamis

Apples to my toes

Apples to the follicles

Flowing up my nose.

Apples to my right brain,

Apples to my lungs

Apples to the taste buds

Tipp’n on my tongue.

Zowie - so in time you see,

Apple butter becomes me.

And given that these apples

Are become I,

That which was blind

Now peers into sky,

Beholding the bend and red of a younger batch.

Indeed. I take apples from their deaf and dumb estate,

And make them orators.

Through me, apples relish symphonies.

Apples know their texture,

Apples know their taste

Apples, like some distant star

That fell from outer space

look back into the sky

to see an ancient kin.

Oh, Apples of the world unite,

Throw off your shackles and join the Kirk

You have nothing to lose but

your mind.

Oh I am the great liberator of apples!

Materialist mistake that which limits life for life itself – Leo Tolstoy

If a man will not believe in God, the danger is not that he will believe in nothing, but that he will believe in anything.  G. K. Chesterton. 

Note: This next poem is really a song with a tune. (It “came” to me it while working a second night job, in which I experienced that creative “high” that results from sleep deprivation.) It starts like a Gregorian chant and then loosens up and weaves between drunk-punk and the sound of Pewee Herman on speed. Instrumentation calls for sitars and rain sticks, drills and gongs, and the periodic sound of a hand grenade. It is much better sung, but then you would have to pay me a great deal to do it.

In the beginning

was …..

a bI N K.

A band of heated ink

A dark dot in the dark

A bullet in the heart

Of nada.

 

In the beginning was a point

An un-appointed point

A point without any

point

A point without any light

For the point was very fast,

And the point was very tight

In the weight of its monolithic allness.

 

ALLL-NESSSS

 

But then

That which had ever been

Or that that was

Just then, suddenly grew in

Thin

Dense

Hence, it exploded.

 

Bang ....

 

 

BIG BANG!

It sang

It rang, it ran

Like light poured through a fan

Zoooooooooooooming into the cosmos, even

As it was, and caused it.

 

In time, In time

The stars began to shine

Shimmer, shake, and roll;

Mutate and twine,

climb the periodic table.

 

And now

After billion and billions of boofs

What bounty that starlight has wrought

 

Andromeda to Madonna

Stellar ash to sequin

Primordial soup to Campbell’s

Molecule to Mandolin.

 

Oh,

The stars, the stars

Are shining on TV

And they and we and the screen and the sea

Everything is stellar, everything divine

Everything machine, everything sublime.

 

 

Oh --

Pirouette, pantomime

Panty hose and silly rhyme …

All stuffed in that one darn speck

HECK!

Hell – Bliss

Dynamite and diapers

Diaphragms and holsters

Dungarees and dingoes

Calvin and Hawking,

Einstein and Edsel

Mother T. and Mr.

Genocide and monsters

Karl Marx and stalkers,

Pit bulls, and pythons

Monty and mushrooms

Jesus, and generals

Auschwitz and sneakers, creepers and reapers,

This poem and Jeepers!

­­HAA Ha ha ha ha

All stuffed in that one darrn speck. Oh …

Cars and stars and bars and Mars and toys and boys and 

Bills and pills and stores and bores and spores and whores and smores and chores … And wars

All stuffed in that one poor speck

 

 

Bang.

 

Oh,

Carl, Carl

Can you say again, what it is I really am?

 

I am star – I am spam,

I am chaos come afar

(Shouted) The chaos is all that ever is--or was—

or will be!

 

AND

The cosmos come aware has taken on a flair for casting life like fire from itself!

 

Oh look, the sun –

"Hi dad,"

Want to hear a sunny song?

 

Sunnshine on our shoulder

Makes us happy …

Sunshine on our …

 

Oh Dear. All full of light, but you can’t hear …

 

Ohhhh.

I am reason rendered from the non

I am ticking like a bomb.

 

All is one

and One is all,

I’m beginning to fade into it --

I’m beginning to

wash into iiit

I am ..

 

I’m beginning to loose it

All.

 

 

When Everything is Matter

Why does nothing seem to,

What’s the matter with the matter anyway.

-

For an audio version try:

http://startledbyexistence.squarespace.com/audio-bones/2008/2/21/molecule-to-mania.html

TH E M AC A MAN (97)

Tonight, working at my part-time janitorial at Mac Steel.

I find the place enthralling.. And hot. This isn't my world. The place is huge, with a building half a mile long and stories high, with great cranes on tracks running overhead. Grit and burnt smoke and tubes, and parts, and gears, and chains, and showers of sparks … and mostly the glowing steel. This is a Manly-man place.

(As it is, I clean bathrooms and floors in offices located in the plant itself. Just to enter, I walk past buckets of boiled red molten, and shafts of just made steel that glow like the top of an electric range.)

Tonight I watched the chamber in which they melt steel. I think they use scrap bits of steel from other places and things, and melt them down. I talked to a guy who said they ­­­­feed huge quantities of electricity into the chamber … You can see big foil looking accordion tubes -- that look like the hoses of old fashioned hair dryers -- going into the chamber. I guess that’s what carries the voltage. The chamber is about the size of a small house, three stories high. An oven door opens at the base, and you can see the jumping glow inside. Once in a while some guy in a moon suit gets near the gate and sticks in a pole to help the flow or test or brush off the slag. Dear, again don't know what I'm talking about. When the guy pulls out his pole it smokes and burns at the end. He looks to me like a lion tamer. He would tame the sun. A little sun is in the cage and jumping wildly about and cracking. This is a noisy place, The little-sun rages and smears, whips and breaks and turns on itself like an angry beast. Sometimes the sun boils with light through the slit at the base and coats the walls some hundreds of feet away with light. The light on the walls will fool you. It is night, but it looks like the light of the early sun poured on the walls. The sun-tamers wear dark shields. If not, they would all go blind with the raking of the slag.

I'm not sure where the boiled melt goes from here. You can see huge overhead cranes lifting iron ladles like rooms. I can't see it from there, except to know, that when they pour something somewhere that I can't see, I do see showers of sparks and big popping noises and smoke going up as if from the inferno.

Later, or somewhere else on the production line, I see shafts of red molten descending into things that look like the big guns on battle ships. Orange tubes the size of telephone poles descending into vertical canons, with showers of sparks and water. They pour water over everything at that stage to keep everything cooler.

Later the canon tips and pushes out the orange telephone pole of steel onto some kind of great conveyor hot-steel mover. The tubes roll, push, skate, or otherwise get moved from that place to other places on the line, all without ever being touched. As makes sense. One touch and there goes the arm.

The process is multifaceted from there -- More ovens, more belts, sawing and squeezing and such. The goal, as I understand it simple. Cylinder shafts of high-grade steel, made to the specific quality and size requirements of the customer. The auto industry buys a lot of Mac steel for things like transmissions.

So, what is all this to say.

I've learned that they keep guys and a few gals working here around the clock. I figured at first that the crew was lean at night, because it is night, but I've learned that apart from administrators, this place is about as lean by day. Given the high level of automation, it takes only about thirty workers spread over half a mile to check computers, make tests, push buttons and repair broken things. The greater machine of Mac Steel runs itself.

Now here is the thought:

This machine -- The Mac Steel plant -- is something like a body.

Granted, we are generally more concerned with what human bodies do, than what they excrete, but you could make a loose comparison.

The plant of Mac Steel does a few rudimentary human things. In as much as it or its machines have sensors, Mac Steel has a rude sensory system. Some of those sensors "see", others "feel" temperature. I'm not sure about hearing classical music or any such thing, but the plant does sing with various groans, alarms and whistles.

Beyond that, you could say the thing moves. Mostly internal apart from a hard wind, but the internal movement and related nervous system is substantial. Lots of wires, conduit, computers, pulleys, gears, motors, pipes, and any number of machines for lifting hauling, pushing, moving pouring, banging, belching, spewing and the like.

Would the toilets in the system be like the part of a cell that whisks away foreign bacteria?

Finally, the Mac-a-Man thinks. Given offices and assembly lines and a host of computers to aid every inch, the thing "thinks" quite a bit.

I still have a hard time seeing how machine thought could ever, even in our wildest sci-fi imagination, compare with human thought. That though might be faster, more accurate, or more capable of certain kinds of computation, but it would always be in my mind -- cold thought. Thought unaware of its thinking.

Anyway, there we have it … The Mac-a-Man. A thing that chews iron and poops steel.

Now, I'm not sure if you can really make this comparison, the kinds of construction and complexity are different things, but I guess we could venture, for the sake of some thinking, that the Mac-a-man and a bio-man are of substantial complexity. One a bit heavier on the skeletal side and plumbing, the other more prone to poetry, but for the sake of odd thought - equals.

I am wondering today, could you ever make a Mac-a-man to make itself?

That is, could we ever design some computer program that would, from the ground up, build everything that goes into the plant?

Now we shouldn't be stingy. In as much as any human infant is fed by belly for the first nine months and suckled for the next 18 years, we should give to our Mac-a-mite certain base components. A mountain of scrap steel, an electric plant, some porcelain and glass … maybe even a fleet of Tonka trucks and kilns to start the process.

All that, and a computer chip from the year 2100 capable of holding cities of computers on something the size of a period.

Our first order will be to make something like a bolt. The Mac-a-man will need lots of bolts. So first, our chip must be able to teach or form something cable of making bolts. Ha, we will need to first make a machine to make bolts!

And to make the machine that should make bolts? Why some other machine.

I follow this process back and back and back, and now I have in my mind machines the size of ants excreting polymers, or metals or glue or something. Anything to make anything happen that could happen apart from some self existing and all ready running machines. Or, even given our base bounty of machines, we shall have to reinitiate or invent from about the start of machines! We shall have to make our initial program capable of molding clay or beating bronze. And then we shall have to create the thing to mold the clay or beat the bronze. We shall have to make things form wood, or rediscover the making of plastics.

Here, I'm beating my head harder than I know how to think.

Try as I might, and with a whole host of programs, and even allowing for micro-technology that should start us with cranes or smelters the size of crickets, I have a hard time seeing the thing happen.

It seems impossible, apart from active and ongoing human intelligence and design, to have a Mac-a-man make itself.

Odd thought number two:

Had a second odd thought tonight. I'll move it away form the Mac-a man to something like a Boeing 747. The thing is more contained and by virtue of size and containment for like a man and thinkable. Human involvement in the building of the Boeing as a given. No self-creating flying machines!

So, I think instead, How many years will it take us to build a Boeing if we were to start from the scratch? I mean real scratch. The year is 1524. Guttenberg (sp?) is alive, but to top it off, we have a whole crew of men who now make Boeings to help us make our Boeing.

Given forty scientist .. and Guttenberg, how many years will it take us to build the Boeing.

Here, even here, with the idea in our head and some sense of history, it seems we should have to repeat most of that history just to get to where we are. We shall have to have Edison and Kitty Hawk, and some unknown numbers of wars just to develop the technologies that will go into the technologies that go into the technologies. So ugh (dark thought) how many men does is take to make a Boeing. Some millions dead in the first World War just to provide the impetus.

And this is a hard thought. Would we, apart from carnage have half the benefits we now enjoy. This is more than I care to think and the wrong direction, but still, I think. Even with our host of eminent scientist, we have lost so much of what has preceded us, that we should probably need to reinvent most things along the way just to get to our wires and computers and lights, and soap.

We shall need to make locomotives to make grease or something of the like.

So how many years does is take to make a Boeing … 50, 500, or 10,000 … or shudder the thought (and depending on your world-view) 700 billion.

12/01

You

hold within Your ancient eye  - A cityscape

of cut-glass barnacle,

decked in gems and grapes.

(and the grime of the ages):

A kaleidoscope of cornea

A catalog of lens,

A cornucopia of fiber-optic cable

stretched

From every man and beast.

.

(the circled-sun goes round about and splinters through each glass)

And though our eyes

be dim, or dust, or dead

Or cut from our heads, even floating in formaldehyde

like bloated raisins.

Someday you will

dust the whole thing off

blow the cobwebs from our sockets

And every eye now choked

in cataract or death

(Be it on the Earth, or under)

Will blink with sight into the blazing glory of

the SON

And every tongue

now numb with filth

or feeble in your praise,

And every knee now stiff

with aging

or resistance

Will see,

testify, and bend

At the name of Jesus,

to glory of God

the Father.

(Title pilfered from the fine album by Vigilantes of Love of the same title.)

A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny wind-borne insects, bacteria, cells of grass, bark and leaves. Reddened, the light inclines into this valley over green western mountains; it sifts between pine needles on Northern slopes, and through all the mountain blackjack oak and haw, whose leaves are unclenching, one by one, and making an intricate, toothed and lobed haze. The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish side catches the light and bats it my way; I’ve an eyeful of fish-scale and star.   Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek.

Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime. (Unknown kid quote)

A fly is a nobler creature than the sun, because the fly hath life; And the sun hath not.   St. Augustine

Thou sun, of this great world both eye and soul

Acknowledge him thy greater, sound his praise – John Milton

This most beautiful system of sun, planets and comments, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being formed bye the like wise council, must be subject to the same dominion of one.     Sir Isaac Newton.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.    Galileo

Today I ride on a traffic-snake headed east and into the rising sun. And here we sit ten thousand cars, each with a sun in our skull like a coin in the bank.   KJ.

The sun will come up tomorrow – bet your bottom dollar that it will. (Annie)

Here comes the sun. (George Harrison) 

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.  (Ecclesastes 11:7 )

In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun,

which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion;

like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at one end of the heavens

and makes it circuit to the other,

Nothing is hidden from its heat.

David – Psalm 19: 4, 5

From the Journals of the Kirk: Today the sun presses at the morning and through the trees like cheese pressed through a grater …

I think for a moment what would be, if the light didn’t bend .. or I guess, if the sun wasn’t so big that it should hone down a shadow like a cone. Could it be that for one brief moment that the tree hit by the sun on the rising plane should send a dark void that would sail out with total black like a silhouette launched forever and the grass stretched high should cast a total black that would leave each blade behind in total dark.

Today I think of the sun on the world as a sickle. A blade pressed like a plow to the earth and parting the skin with a swell.

Here I am. My camera set. It will catch the first hint of dawn as it makes the sycamore to be like a shaft of rhubarb. I know.. For I have seen it, in the sierra Club Calendars, that most of our pictures are taken now, or at the closing fade for the glorious lessening of light. So is the sun with me now, reaping a volley of shutter clicks? Here the line is not set against so much that is great. The line reaches up from here into Kansas and I guess into Nebraska and the Dakotas . Is some photographer with me catching pink on the four heads of stone? And soon to hit the greater stone works of the west. Will the shutters start clicking with me or behind as the sun pours through the arches and pools. Everyday, a harvest of clicks.

and so much more.

Here is the sun reaping coffee and alarm bells. The bells ring around the world in a creeping line. A thin din some hours before the sun a rising like a mad avalanche of bell ringers. And Dear! A wave of bad breath as we rise!

Or even before. Here is the pulling on the teats of cows. Milk squeezed into the world before the sun and swelling around the world each day. Or the reaping of the rooster crow.

Maybe we could make a map -- a diagram for each thing as it is in relationship to the sun. We should have a round clock map with swelling with the appropriate hours and for each activity.

We should see the swell of waking….

Here the light is catching fire, entering our eyes, rubbed open from the dark of dim dreams. The sun punching into our corporate awareness. The sun growing by the thousands each second -- pouring down the holes of our optic nerves and filling our bodies with the unthinkable light.

I see it now as a flood poring down the wormholes and then … as if the skin of the world were thin, pouring into us and lighting vast inner caverns. Each man is a cavern taking in and making bit the sun.

I think too of the prayers.

Pastor Bob said that Charles Wesley said something like this: I have so much to do today, that I can not think about starting until I have spent two or three hours in prayer!"

Now how's that for a way to greet the sun! I rise with a whisper of thanks but the prayers come hard. I rise already distracted, but how many better souls are out there. How many better souls to put time before the reaping of the day. Ha …. Now a map for prayer intensity. Have we cooled a bit in the last centuries? Or do the sisters of Mercy greet each day with a bonfire of prayer in India . Or is it now that these Continental States that once lifted prayer like a volcano now smolder with the coming of sun. Has the fire shifted? Will they greet the day with Alleluia in Bolivia or Seoul ? Is the light of God brighter than the light of Sun poured out into some waking eyes?

I see it with my mind. The rotating earth, prayers lifted up in a chorus or swell.

And then there are Sundays. Give or take some hours for differences in start time, but about 10Am in most places … prayers lifted up along the longitude and rising like a din. Given the sweep of Mexico and South America Below, we should be doing pretty well against our line.

Sun of the Parts:  (original text 1997?, revised 2001)

Note: I say things in this “meditation” that are less than I might hang my hat on these days. While I still am of the opinion that there is a high level of symbol in the Genesis account of creation – The mere mention of mornings and evenings prior to the creation of the sun would suggest as much; however, I am no longer unnerved by the “amazing” time and sequence of Genesis 1. I understand that any creation model by its very character, assumes miracle first, followed by the gradual implementation of the “ordinary rules of providence.”

Many moderns astronomers suggest that the atoms that make up our planet and everything in it were once in stars. A strict reading of Genesis would suggest otherwise. Neither of those ideas are the focus of this mediation. Just the same, some of these thoughts are high on wonder, but short on comprehension or how energy works. Rather than recreate the whole thing to reflect my thinking (which still moves). I’ve woven in some counterpoints and corrections from my friend Roy. 

Right now, I look point blank at the “source” of everything I see. The sun is setting, warm and velvet clear. We are living in the Renaissance, painted by Vermeer. Everything looks realer than real, I feel like we have been dipped in amber. My shadow goes long before me, I am the stickman wearing stilts, I am a moon man walking giant strides. I am an anorexic butterfly casting shadow … I am an idiot.

Then I consider the marvel that I am standing in some splinter of light that has traveled some eight minutes just to get here, only to peter out in such soft grand fashion. Do the molecules of sky slow it down? I am being hit, straight in the face and not knocked over? That same sun that would fry me if it could – What a knitch! Here between the freeze and flame, with just the right tilt and distance from the sun -- that even some billion hydrogen explosions by the minute, feel luxuriant upon my skin.

Today I am thinking a big and wild thought, and it feels like one of the bigger thoughts that I have ever thunk.

I am thinking that the world is sun. Reconstituted sunlight on a bun. Poems, fleas, puns, cabbage, cauliflower … cousins. Everything is sun.

We begin with a world. I guess if you begin with raw fiat creation – the earth is something other than sun, the sun being made after it, so I guess you have at least two kinds of matter, ancient earth stuff and sun. But assuming for the moment that the earth is some cooled chunk o’ sun, or at least spit from the same cosmic spew, it stands that the earth is essentially the stuff of sun.

I don’t know – Could you take a chunk of sun and cool it down to make a planet? Does the sun contain our elements, or are some created by new combinations of what is floating through space? Are elements just that way forever, or do they become what they are through re-combination and time? Some are inert … Dear, I’m beginning to diffuse my thought.

Roy Replies: Regarding idea that our planet of sun stuff … The sun consists almost entirely of hydrogen, with the heavier elements common on Earth making up about 1% of the sun's mass. On the other hand, hydrogen does not make up almost entirely all of the earth. The puzzle of water on the Earth merely emphasizes this paradox. You, Kirk, are a cosmic rarity not only in that there exists but one Kirk, but in that the stuff that makes up your physical body is incredibly scarce.

I am not sure if I am saying this the way I thought it. It always seems like a better thought inside. But here is the idea. The sun which is blind and bright and deaf to its heat… the sun that is all dead and ball and fire and ear spiting light and UNAWARE, is aware, through us. If everything is sun mush, then we are the vehicles by which the sun is growing into life and knowledge.

Though the sun has spun some billion units of thought or sight, it remains deaf, blind and mute. So the sun pours out light that in time becomes reworked into people, or cars, or the music in my ear – and the thing that it is now, looks back to see the source of itself, even as the source is dead and knows nothing of its children.

Roy Replies: While I have argued that the "sun stuff" did not make our planet's atoms, I would remind of another way that one could approach your metaphor. Sun stuff  powers our planet. Energy that has an apparent age of 1 with many zeroes after it years (it takes a while to work up through the sun's hugeness from the interior where the fusion fire burns) powers the plant (corn?) that powers the Kirk that thinks the thought.

Dear, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’d scratched some notes to help me think.

The first say’s “mowing the lawn”.

I remember having this thought some months ago when I mowed the big Lutheran Church lot for Dennis and had to empty the filled bags of clipped grass. It’s no exaggeration to say that given the acres of clipped grass, I emptied over a ton of hot green blade. And that near once a week. Twenty weeks of mowing for some twenty tons of grass.

Where did the weight come from? Some of the grass was made from dirt, but ground never seemed to shrink for being sucked up. I have never seen a tree sink a hole as it grew, even as it dished dirt into sky! I guess too that the grass is a lot of water, caught before it could sink to the water table, but a bunch of that weight was really re-made sun -- Chlorophyll catching light generating food, making grass, making weight.

By the way, has anyone shown this: Is the earth getting heavier by the day as light energy becomes earth matter? And how much? If that one lawn weighed ten thousand lbs. perhaps all the trees and leafs together would make millions of tons per second being added to the earth?

Roy Replies: Well, not exactly. Chlorophyll magic binds together atoms making nearly all the weight. The energy required to bind does have an equivalent weight, but that is so very, very, very small that the best scale could not measure its contribution to the largest forest much less that of a single tree. Where does the plant get most of its stuff? Not sunlight, but air. Most of the plant's weight is carbon oxygen and hydrogen, thus carbon dioxide from the air and water from the ground. Other stuff makes up only a small part of the total weight. Recall, for example, burning a log. Better yet, consider a fireplace history with a lot of logs. This has most of the logs' carbon not left as ash, but turned to carbon dioxide. Not much left behind to have to carry away. That little left is, as a matter of fact, very comparable to the depressions I have had in my front and back lawns where once trees stood and which I removed.

But there is a second thought. And this is where the idea of a common “sea” gets hard.

Dear! Serengeti. Today, or tonight out in the grasslands of Africa , zebras and gazelles mingle with a mix of lion and hyena. Given that the protein ratio is somewhat different for herbivores and carnivores - you could say that each animal is made from different stuff. But when it gets down to it, each of these is either first of second, or maybe third generation grass (Do hyenas eat dead lions?)

Roy : What an incredible, awesome Creator!

We speak of the genetic template. A code so complex and intricate, that just one cell of the stuff can spin a city. DNA and chromosomes. . Like a forest fire building life; This is bizarre beyond contemplation. I understand that a zygote - (a fertilized egg) has within itself a complete chemical coding that sufficient to the task of generating a new being. And that code, comprised of hundred of thousands of information bits, put together just so. Eye color, bulk, something of intelligence - even a code for turning some cells into muscle, or brain, and yet others into "half baked" sex cells, just waiting for completion But it doesn't stop there. ANY CELL, be is gleaned from hair, liver, marrow, or blood - has within it - at least theoretically, all the information needed to create a new "identical " being.

What an incredible, awesome Creator!

So, here it is. 1/100000000 of an ounce of starter stuff, plus 200 pounds of sun, equals one monk in the making. Or, 1/000000000 of an ounce of some other starter stuff plus 200 pounds of sun equals a cow.

Corollary: 1/00000000 of an ounce of Monk starter stuff, plus 200 pounds of cow, equal one monk.

Not a lot of bull....

And this is where it gets odd. We might speak of the material unity of all things, but these little engines – these infinitesimal codes that generate separate beings insure that my brain doesn't spill into yours; at least apart from some difficult attempt to communicate. Each individual is a self contained world of consciousness, and try as I might, even if I were to eat your "stuff", there is a bridge that separates each individual thing that can't be gulfed. A cannibal might eat me, but he will never be me.

Unlike the pagan who does not find you particularly unique, God does. That He is, and that alone, protects that you are.

Sometimes, I try to think what belief in raw evolution entails. The sun slams into some cooled chunk of light. Call it a rock, a storm, or primordial soup … But this is so much light falling on “old” light. Talk about bootstraps! The light does not begin by falling on something that will utilize that energy and transform it --like chlorophyll, … First it must create the chlorophyll. Before some engine can turn light energy into life, dead-light must be made into some form of life – with no pre-existing "engine" to aid the process.

So now, I look out on the world and frame it with my lens. I see the oak tree rising like a celluloid pillar sprouting shade. This is a tube of sod, A straw of light. This is the sun blocking itself and casting its shadow. I see the acorns, ripe to generate life. This is the sun in waiting, waiting to hurl upwards at itself. I see the lawn and the gutters, the green and the white. I see the shingles on the roof (my room was upstairs.) I see the sky. All of this is sun. Cooled, condensed, reworked.

I see me, reflected in my fish-tank, I see a flash of Swordtail. We too are sun. I pick up my camera. It is sun. I point it at the sun. I burn my eye. I burn the sun! I am something of that sun, remade, holding some other bit a sun stored in glass and film. I catch the sun on the film that is sun even I am the sun clicking the shutter. I am the sun taking pictures of myself; I am the sun looking through my eye. I am sunshine on my shoulder.

So here we have the sun savoring its heat, alive with love and pain, Love where none had been … Matter where none had been – or perhaps, energy that has always been ---

ALWAYS BEEN!

Dear, they make this sound thinkable. Either everything that is has come from nothing (unthinkable), or everything that is has come from something--and that something is eternal. (Also pretty much unthinkable.) If we begin with God, we also come before something unthinkable, but the starting point is infinitely different. In one climate, a dead something without dream, imagination, freedom or purpose, culminates in a planet spangled with life. In the other, a living, thinking, all powerful person, purposes a planet that reflects His essence.

Life from non life, or Life from LIFE.

So here it is …

The world before my eyes is light,

Folded back on itself in interesting and complex ways. It is stellar ash aware, having taken on a flair, for casting life like from itself…Or, The world before our eyes is sun and world, made living and diverse by the infinite wisdom of a God who not only creates stuff, but litters the wind with information. He is the Information God. He casts a miracle light on miracle-sod holding information-cities dressed as seed. Everywhere the wisdom of God goes out, re-creating the world with the works of His pleasure.