A Pair of Epiphanies

Before the post... here are the pics I promised of our new living room. I got rid of stuff, moved the piano against a wall to open the place up, and we painted everything in yellowish oranges. So... here is a peek at life inside a pumpkin!




Dearest reader, I beg your indulgence, for portions of what is to come is wordy and oddly complex for those unexposed to terms needful for semi-accurate descriptions. So... for those of you who lose their way here and there in the longish descriptions which follow, please understand the point in describing the two journeys to the incredibly small and the incredibly large, I am only seeking to share the magnitude of scale of the song of creation. If those passages prove too long or confusing, please skip on and just know I have felt something, sensed something, that is hard to describe. I feel these descriptions are important to understanding what I felt this past Sunday morning as I walked in a natural setting waking to a new day.

--------------------------

Two insights came to me on Sunday. One spiritual, one personal. Well, I suppose even the spiritual insights are personal ones. Like all insights, they really can’t be shared. They can be told, but everyone feels, discovers, truth for themselves. A given truth is like most given things, not nearly as appreciated as those we obtain ourselves.

The first was early in the morning, and echoed through the day. I was on the far side of the large open fields at Molalla River State Park, the stage for so many personal dramas. I followed the path in the dark (the moon had recently set).

The familiar hush as night creatures disappeared and day dwellers still slept, was broken by my footsteps, alternating between rustling grass and the soft thud of the packed dirt.

A shaft of red, wriggling through the darkness shot dramatically into the sky. Ruby light, weakest of visible light, in striking the atmosphere bent and slipped around the edge of the world, bouncing off the clouds scuttling around Mount Hood, stabbing across the dark, stabbing through a break in the clouds, and sang to me.

It was beautiful.

Such a simple sentence... “It was beautiful.” Such a short sentence. It does not really say anything. It does not express what I saw, what I felt. “Beautiful” is too brief a term.

Three ideas came together in that moment. I have had them before, but in this context it was as if that shaft of red had stabbed across the edge of the world and struck me with the force of truth.

At the smallest of imaginable levels, smaller than a molecule, or an atom, or a neutron... smaller than the triune nature of quarks, quantum strings vibrate. These threads weave together to form the fabric of reality, of our universe. Just as a guitar string vibrates and produces a sound, these energetic wires thinner than sub atomic particles, vibrate and produce... mass... energy... gravity... They sing out and their voices ring out in a song that sings:

“I am matter, I am more and I am less than I seem. I roil and spin and twitch and I sing in my realm of 12 dimensions a song that you can hear which sounds like only four... height, width, depth, time. I am the voice of God, whispered into the smallest of spaces, joined by countless other strings, and we produce chords which sing creation into existence. We are the song of the building blocks of atoms. We are your limited reality, an echo from realities you cannot see, cannot hear. We are joy. We are love. We are community and unity and separate and one. We are the voice of God, and you exist because of our song.”

That song of reality echoed in my heart, and I knew that my limited reality, a mere four dimensions, is only vapor. Just as I might see a drawing as a mere two dimensional image, a crude representation of the greater reality in which I live... moving about in three physical realms, dragged along in the entropic dimension of time, I hear the song that says there are more... there is more... and the song from beyond gives me shape... as thin and limited as it is.

I am a ghost of a truer reality, I am so limited to only four of at least 12 dimensions. I sense there is more, but I cannot touch it, any more than the cartoon image on a sheet of paper can reach out and play a musical instrument in my world.

And the thought swings in the other direction, the other end of the scale of things.

Far from that quantum reality where all appears to be random, all appears to be chance, all appears to be much less and much more than I can see, is the incredibly large.

A hundred years ago men thought our universe was just this one galaxy. It takes a 100,000 years for light to travel from one side to the other of this spinning disk of two to four hundred billion stars.

Then in 1992 and 1923 Edwin Hubble gathered enough evidence to prove that the Milky Way was only one of many galaxies, “island universes.” We now suspect there may be 500 billion galaxies.

They do not swim through the universe alone. They form huge groups, form strings, bubbles, patterns across vast distances. Gravity is not restricted by size or distance. Gravity from these galaxies reach to each other and they dance a complex pattern around a central galaxy. The center of that galaxy harbors a black hole of billions of solar masses. That invisible, massive heart beats a rhythm of pulsing x rays, heating the rarefied intergalactic gases with shock waves, a drum sounding hundreds of octaves below the range of human ears.


These galactic superclusters, the largest structures discovered in our universe, so large light takes 500 million years to travel from one side to the other, sing.

Sing.

From the unimaginably small to the unimaginably large, the universe sings.

When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:
"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!"
"Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!"

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!"

"I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out."
Luke 19:37-40

The rocks do cry out! The earth sings! That shaft of crimson shouted to me, sang to me, and I heard.

The entire universe sings. The fabric of space and time is a cloth made up of threads which sing glory and reality to create this four dimensional realm, this shadow of a truer reality.

Who I am, what I am, is a wisp of smoke, a faint ghost drifting in a limited universe.

And my heart sings!

And there is a mystery... Why is that unusual?

Why is it that the one species on this small clump of rock spinning madly around such an ordinary star, this species that is blessed with the sense of beauty, the gift of creativity, a mind that is imaginative and free, is reluctant to join the rest of the universe and sing a song of praise?

Why do we not let our hearts soar in the knowledge that we are held together, the atoms of our bodies are merely the echo of a song sung beyond, and we do not tremble with joy?

When I turn my mind to God, when my thoughts reach across the scales which measure from quantum levels to half a billion light years, and I allow my heart to follow my mind, I tremble.

Not because I fear Him. Or perhaps I do. Not because I stand in judgement, but because I see how small I am, how mighty He is, how small my range of thought and feelings are, and how vast and holy He is, and I tremble because I know that mighty eye, that powerful consciousness, is turned toward me, is aware of me, loves me.

Oh... what a mightily fearful thing!

I have many gifts. I have been blessed with an intensely curious mind that seeks to learn. I have been blessed with an eye for beauty and the desire to use it creatively. I am healthy, fit, and can do many imaginative tricks, gifts given to a clever primate.

But they are all nothing.

I have only one thing of any value.

There is only one thing I think truly pleases my God.

He has given me free will, the ability to choose... and with this heart He gave me, and this freedom... I choose...

to love.

The only thing I truly have is my heart.

All I have is my respect, my joy, my adoration.

That was my first epiphany. That the universe sings, from the improbably small to the improbably large, and that I am designed to sing in trembling adulation.

The second epiphany was much more human, but it also dealt with my heart.

My marriage has been filled with hurts, and when the pain ceased, it felt like pleasure.

Have you ever had something hurt so much, a toothache, a splinter, an arrow through your thigh, that the cessation of the pain feels like pleasure? It isn’t really pleasure, I think. Just the stopping of the pain feels so wonderful.

A certainty came to me that my wife is not truly working to heal our marriage as she so frequently claims. Her recent silence suggests she is occupied. She is with him.

A few months ago the thought would make my heart pound and I would stress over the idea, fret over it, wonder if I should drive there and prove the truth of it.

But not this past weekend... I felt no such feelings.

I discovered, I didn’t care.

I find myself creating a new home, a new life with my children, and I marvel at how pleasant it is to run this home peacefully.

It is sort of like hitting my thumb with a hammer. It hurts like hell. And when the throbbing stops the cessation feels almost like pleasure.

Was my marriage so dysfunctional that between the blows of the pounding hammer I mistook the relief from pain as pleasure?

My marriage is over.

This is what acceptance feels like.

----------------------------------------

Well, the above post was a difficult one to write. I kept getting bogged down in trying to explain the details of the two extremes of the scale of our reality. Until I realized that it does not matter if I accurately express the details of those scales. All that is important is that I give a good hint at the scale, and how I feel within it.

I feel that if I am not awestruck by the thought of who I worship, then I am not thinking about it very clearly.

The second insight about my wife has rolled along, and in perfect timing, seen its natural fruition. Today the letter from the court came telling me that the judgment is done and I am divorced.

It feels strange.

I'll get better... and I think it will be quicker than I would have thought.

It seems lately I have been taking longer strides through this mess.

I've been writing, but it is too scattered to post.

I feel sad... I feel relieved... I feel hopeful... and there are feelings I can't quite identify.

But, it probably won't be too long when I stop thinking "I'm divorced" and start thinking "I'm single."

Being married has been such a central part of my identity that it feels weird to have this cut away.

It's like an amputation. It had to go. It was gangrene and it was killing me and it needed to be cut away.

But as screwed up as it was, it was what I knew, and even in awful places, what is familiar is comfortable.

We had a Moon Howlin' Tuesday night.
I shared many of the ideas in this post.

Marinated venison.
Now that is how it should be cooked!

This past year I had a large tree cut down in my front yard. It was a threat to my home and I cut it down. I planted a pear tree nearby. It has plenty of room to grow, to produce something useful. Fruit instead of pine needles.

I went home to get Jeremiah... take him to my mother in law's (ex mother in law?). My divorce papers came today... it is final...

But. to the point. That little pear tree, planted during a very tough year for me... I dug a hole gently through its roots... and I put the decoration that was on top of our wedding cake into the hole. The tree will grow up and over it. There will be something new growing over something old.

I asked Jeremiah to take a couple of pictures for me...