Looking Up

"An Aftertaste of Heaven"

“Our universe is a single immense energy event that began as a tiny speck that has unfolded over time to become galaxies and stars, palms and pelicans, the music of Bach, and each of us alive today.”

Journey of the Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker

After almost three years of filling this blank space with words breathlessly strung together in my rush to understand what the earth asks of me, of humans, in this time of existential peril, I am finally out of words.  Blame it on the eclipse.  My wish that the totality would offer an experience of transformation has come true and all I can do is stammer and shake my head and sit on the porch and watch with a newfound wonder as the bluebird makes her nest in the nesting box on the edge of the field.  

Since the fires out west made the sun dawn scarlet over the ocean in September of 2021, I have used these pages to rethink those harmful, culturally absorbed assumptions about myself which led me to the false supposition that the world was my oyster, mine to slurp and stockpile and show off as proof of the worthiness of MY SELF.   

Circles, not triangles; participation, not stardom; care, not indifference; emanation, not control; connection not separation.

I’ve sought to learn what I need to know about life on earth from the moss and the lichen and the robins and the oak trees. We humans are not only dependent on each other but on all of nature for our survival. Each of us is beautiful with something important to bring to this effort at flourishing.  I’d learned what I needed to learn, seen what I needed to see, or so I thought. 

But as I lay on that blue tarp last week and looked up from the earth into the slowly darkening sky and then sat for 3 minutes and 18 seconds in the wonder of the totality, I realized that the vast wonder of the universe of which earth is a tiny speck offers me an entirely new view, not only of the cosmos, but of myself.  I was stunned. I am still stunned. I feel as if the cosmic energy I saw coming from the sun last week is here in my body now as I sit on the porch in this little spot of earth called Moose Crossing. My home is here on earth and at the same time in the vast and timeless universe which asks nothing of me but awe.  All I want to do it giggle.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

All this week I’ve been walking around with the sense that time, the universe’s time, has nothing to do with the clock on the wall.  The frantic sense I have that there is such a small window of time for us to get carbon consumption down before all hell breaks loose hasn’t gone away, but it sits side by side now with the idea that whatever happens will be part of something so much larger, and so beyond my control, and so filled with its own power that I can surrender to the wisdom of creation. 

That doesn’t mean I won’t go to the standouts in front of LLBean to get them to ditch their Citi Bank Credit card or keep supporting our local actions like encouraging plant-based eating.  I will keep doing those things because the earth asks me to do them.  But the universe, the universe will keep radiating the mind-bending powers of destruction and creation I observed last week.  I can lean into that. Rest in that. 

Another thing that’s changed is my experience of walking in the woods and seeing all the destruction wrought by the last two storms whose force severed hundreds maybe thousands of limbs from the white pines and the birch trees, upended whole spruce and red maple, their roots now facing up and their bodies lying inert on the ground.

Before the totality, I think I would have focused only on the destruction in the forest and been terribly saddened. But this week I saw the wreckage and all the new life pushing up, spilling forth and connected it not just to the earthly powers of nature but to the whole flow of energy from the beginning of time, from the expansion and contraction of the universe which transformed primal atoms into starts and galaxies. And again, I was able to rest in that. 

And I have one more thing to tell you about what’s going through my head. I have this buzzing sense that I am giving off sparks of light, light that emerged 13.8 billion years ago with the birth of the universe.  So, if you see me anytime soon, don’t be frightened by a sudden flaring of light like a firefly in the field in June.

This is the part where I lose words and find it hard to continue to tell this story. I am not a student of philosophy or of ancient spiritual practices or a physicist or an astronomer or an astrologist and thus, I am groping for language to describe this new experience, this new relationship to the cosmos.  

Finally, I think to ask Google, the digital witch,. “What does it mean that the universe is vibrating inside my body?” I type onto the digital page. “Cosmic consciousness”, she/he/they tell me.  Curiously, the term was first used in 1902 by Maurice Burke, a member of my own profession, a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote a personal and psychological account of this form of consciousness: Cosmic Consciousness: a Study of the Evolution of the Human Mind.

Here’s his account (people wrote in the third person then!) of the origins of his own cosmic consciousness taken from The Marginalian.

It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor* which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.

*Brahman is a Vedic Sanskrit word, and it is conceptualized in Hinduism, states Paul Deussen, as the "creative principle which lies realized in the whole world".

Next week I may have dissolved into atoms and star dust but if not, I will be back to tell you more about what I am learning about cosmic consciousness and its relationship to this dark time of transition we are facing. Will cosmic consciousness lead me to give up my concerns for life on this planet, go off on a buying spree, eat juicy hamburgers, fly to Paris for the weekend, get a new Beans Citi Bank card and use those Bean’s Bucks to buy more socks?

Stay tuned.

Next week will also be my last Substack until the light leaves us in the fall and I return. Come this time of year, the dirt outside the window beckons and instead of arranging words on a page I dig holes in the garden for new plants and shrubs to take hold, for flowers to blossom and berries to ripen.

And reader, if you were fortunate enough to have seen the eclipse and feel even a little transformed yourself, do drop something in the comments!!