What Does the Universe Reveal about Ourselves?

And...going outside, saying goodbye.

Dear Reader,

Before I begin this week’s post, I want to thank you, reader, for showing up here Sunday mornings and accompanying me on my mission to stay awake to this moment in our planet’s history when all life is endangered by our presence on its land. I am saying goodbye until sometime in the fall when the dark and the cold return and the need to write rises again in my bones.

When I sit down to write before the blank screen, I feel the thrill of adventure, as if I am embarking on an expedition to an unexplored land.  In my pack I have a few images from the week that resonate and hum, and it is these I take out for inspiration and line up on the shelf of my mind.  I write a sentence.  Then the next.  Hours later I can see from what’s on the page that, indeed, I do have a mind and a heart, both of which, without the writing, often feel far off and elusive.  And then, overnight, I get to send those sentences out to you where they are absorbed into your mind! What a miracle.

It is your presence, reader, which brings these words into being and I am deeply grateful for that. But it is time for me to go outside.  In the time of light and warmth, I am content to wander outside in search of a different kind of adventure.  But I will miss you!  

May your summer be bright and filled with joy and wonder and connection to loved ones and neighbors and robins and dandelions! And stars. Look for me in the fall when the birds migrate and the garden goes to sleep.

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In last week’s post I promised to return this morning with more reflections on the post-totality experience I was having of being, literally, lit by the universe. I confess I haven’t gotten very far in that endeavor. There is so much to learn. The science! The history! The spirituality! All this while the war in Gaza goes on and images of starving children break everyone’s heart and it’s 1968 again and students are arrested on campus and Donald Trump falls asleep in the courtroom. And the magnolias bloom.

But I procrastinate. Let me begin.

It wasn’t until about a hundred years ago that we learned how vast a place this is, this place that lies beyond our window, beyond our neighborhood, our continent, our planet.  Look up into the night sky.  What seems as if it is an empty, lonely space inhabited by a smattering of stars and planets and our waxing and waning buddy, the moon, is instead the home of at least 200 billion observable galaxies all inhabiting a gravitational swirl of dust and dark matter which is, as you read this, moving away from us, and expanding even further into time/space.  And that’s just the ones we can see!  Some of the those, are you ready, originated 13.8 billion years ago, the light from their birth just reaching us now. 

The 4 AM view from our back porch of the setting full moon in the tree and the solar lantern in the foreground.

200 billion galaxies. Light from 13.8 billion years ago, and me, the product of the explosion of a supernova.  Me! Who am I in this story?  Who are you?  How does this story tell us something about our destiny, our very existence? I feel so unprepared to answer those questions.

But this is not the first time in the last few years that I was startled by my ignorance of history and thrust into a journey, nay a pilgrimage, to unearth that history.  As I explored our relationship to this land we live on in order to try to understand how we as a people had become so disconnected from that land and had despoiled it so greatly, I learned what I never was taught in school about the great harm the prosperity of this country was built on:  the slave trade and the genocide of the indigenous population.  These new stories revealed whole other narratives of who we are as a country, who I am as a citizen of that country and what it is these stories ask of me.

Identity is a cultural formation shaped almost entirely by the way our DNA interacts with the important stories our ancestors tell us, or the ones the media hypes or our institutions boost, or our literature reflects.  I spent fifty years of my life exploring these stories with the people who walked through my door in some quest to alter the stories lodged inside their minds in order to live a better life. 

But I did it all within a framework that narrowed those stories to ones that focused almost entirely on the self or the family and the negative beliefs we held and the emotions we experienced. This way of working put humanity’s success at the center of the universe.  This narrowing of story made for such a small life, I see now. Me and my things. Me and my job. Me and my spouse and my kids and my house and the fence around the yard.

Then, at the far end of my career, in the middle of my pilgrimage, I discovered another lens from which to view the question of who me and my ancestors are.  With this eyepiece in place, my world widened, my curiosity grew, my empathy expanded, and my joy increased!  I learned this new way of seeing, called two eyed seeing, from Native American teachers like Dr. Darren Ranco and Dwayne Tomah whose people, equipped with two eyed seeing, flourished on this land outside my window for 11,000 years. 

It is they and the ever-expanding literature on indigenous ecology which taught me that we are all related not only to the two-legged beasts but to the rivers and the squirrels and the butterflies.  It is the Wabanaki story about how men and women emerged from an ash tree when Gluscabe’s arrow pierced its trunk that reshaped my view of myself.  Kin is the word they use. And they are very clear: unless we learn about this kinship and begin to practice it, we are doomed.

Kin. I confess I wasn’t a very good sister to my four siblings.  I didn’t do what I just watched the male bluebird do for the female who was perched on the nesting box when a robin tried to land there. I didn’t pay attention.  I didn’t feel any responsibility to swoop down and chase harm away. I regret that.  But I am old now and have time to think back about my regrets and set things right. Not only to my sisters but to the river. 

I realize that once again I am ill-informed and ignorant. Once again, I lack not only knowledge about the billions of years of the history of the universe but stories about how to be in relationship to this billion years old place out of which this body formed. Once again, I didn’t learn anything about the billon year history of this planet and my atoms in school. 

What does it mean to have consciousness in this universe?  How does it differ from the brilliance that brought forth the Big Bang and the galaxies and the hydrogen and helium and iron that make up life?  Stars surely can’t reflect upon themselves as we can reflect on ourselves and make decisions about what to care for and what to cast off. 

I have a sense that I am on the cusp of discovering something wondrous and wild about what it means to be human and kin to the fourteen-billion-year-old ever-expanding universe. Something that will, I hope, give me more wisdom, more inspiration about how to respond to our earth’s Code Red plight.  I am going to spend the summer reading, learning, paying attention.  And when the dark, cold returns in the late fall, I will be back to tell you about the story of me and the universe. 

I am going to close with a quote from the book Journey of the Universe by Brian Swimme and Mary Tucker, two authors who have devoted their lives to the question of humanity’s relationship to the universe.

We are in the midst of vast destruction, but is is simultaneously a moment of profound creativity. We are involved with building a new era of Earth’s life. Our human role is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves. Our challenge is to construct livable cities and to cultivate healthy foods in ways congruent with Earth’s patterns. Our role is to provide the hands and hearts that will enable the universe’s to come forth in a new order of well-being. Our destiny is to bring forth a planetary civilization that is both culturally diverse and locally vibrant, a multiform civilization that will enable life and humanity to flourish.

Meanwhile, the wonder. 

With gratitude,

Kathleen