Lately I’ve been thinking about life, the universe, everything… You know—
Light Stuff
—like thoughts about the nature of reality and what everything is really all about.
Recently my husband Jon told me that cosmologists discovered a distant galaxy with no stars in it, only masses and masses of gas. Photos of far distant galaxies spark a wonder inside me. This wonder helps me on dark days here on earth in our small galaxy with our beautiful blue planet that is filled with tribes of all too violent and self-centered humans.
How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?
– Ridley Scott
Hearing about black holes and massive spiral galaxies also sparks a deep sense of wonder in my heart. Above all, I really do wonder what the true nature of reality is. Jon often laughingly says that somewhere somehow there is a group of white mice running experiments on all of us. (This idea comes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe book series.) Some days I wish that this life on earth was just a simulation and that there were other simulations where humans learned to be more wise, peaceful, and gentle.
We live on an obscure hunk of rock and metal circling a humdrum sun, which is on the outskirts of a perfectly ordinary galaxy comprised of 400 billion other suns, which, in turn, is one of some hundred billion galaxies that make up the universe, which, current thinking suggests, is one of a huge number, perhaps an infinite number, of other closed-off universes. From that perspective, the idea that we’re at the center, that we have some cosmic importance, is ludicrous.
– Carl Sagan
All One
I have no answers to the woes of our planet except to know in my heart that there is more to this life we live than what we experience in the moment. There is a sacredness, and ineffableness to life and everything we experience. It is that sacredness and ineffableness that I seek to express in my photography.
In 2012 when I was living on the Big Island of Hawaii for three months, I had an experience of the ineffable that stays with me still. On a cloudy morning I was swimming at a local beach in Hilo, the only person in the water, when it began to lightly rain. Raindrops landed on the surface of the ocean and sat there for a moment like tiny beautiful iridescent orbs. Such beauty! I was mesmerized! After a few seconds of floating on the ocean’s calm surface the luminescent raindrops simply dissolved into the ocean. They went from being separate individual entities to merging into the whole almost instantaneously. It felt like a metaphor for our lives here on earth. We live seemingly as individuals and yet are connected to everything whether we realize it or not. I like to think that when we die we dissolve into the whole like those beautiful raindrops did.
Meanwhile On to the Mundane
One of our neighbors cleared an ice rink on the pond behind our house over the weekend. This is the latest it’s been to have skate-able ice since we’ve lived here. Usually we see skaters on the pond for much of December too.
I’m looking forward to seeing lots of kids out skating on the pond in the coming week or two as the weather warms up a bit.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.– Douglas Adams
Have a beautiful week friends.
May you walk in beauty.
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