Yes, time and chance happen to us all. Destiny often rides on a small miscue that directs a person one foot from where he would have stood before. And one may find destiny may rely more on what we lose than what we gain. All the while you pine for some small token of childhood (irreplaceable, of course), the way you compensate for the loss moves the gears significantly on their course. One wonders about control, for the things we do not notice add up to more than a butterfly effect upon our futures. But perhaps what Gandhi told us makes sense here: what we do is insignificant, but it is very important that we do it. For all we may be able to achieve is to hold on, sometimes for dear life. Or let go, and see where the wind really goes.

Antonio Puri: Revisiting Sarnath 1

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We measure things in millions, now, and give no second glance to the number. But we do not comprehend what it really might be. One can say he can spend a million dollars, but he does not dole it out one dollar at a time; it is in sizable chunks, and perhaps, after it is all gone, he never actually experienced all that such a number could mean. We are overloaded by these numbers; billions are even worse. A million, one might, through patience, absorb — a billion, though, no human being ever truly held this number in his head. Ever. He may have held the ten digits that represent it, but that number is beyond this mortal brain to process. And these numbers are said so many times, that one has no opportunity to truly wrap one’s cognitive facilities around them. One should respect such numbers. They are more than the stars you can see in the sky with the naked eye, even out in the deepest country field — when the whole of night is ablaze with the punctuation of God.

If what they do does not make you destitute, or in some way derail your life: if all they can do is take your money, then they cannot take a thing away from you that you do not give them: for all of what you truly possess, what is truly yours — your soul, your humanity — this is yours, and only yours, to keep or waste, by what you decide to be and do when you are wronged. This is the love of God, that He made it so that the material things are only as valuable as how much you have decided your treasure is to be these things; where your treasure is, there your heart shall be also, the good book says. When you decide that you will not be one iota less kind to someone else because of something evil done unto you, this is treasure indeed. Gold cannot buy such graces, and sometimes, we lose a little material to gain meaning we might never have received had we not so lost.

weaves of breezes shape the sense of time flowing as invisible fabrics across my skin
we, as harbingers of a better day: inhale the darkness and calculations, exhaling light
with every kick of the psyche, to break any glass ceiling of dreaming, of imagination
shifting through the planes of existence as if the angels gave you momentary wings
hero after hero have conquered the skies, only to long for a home to touch down to
thus the challenge: to love in all might without one need that tomorrow should come
i return to myself, having been scattered by many dreams, by the dream of the world
the wind of the waking world i find quickly familiar, to wonder, where have i been?
i have dreamed i did heroic things, fought the beast at the dark side of strange skies
and when God found me, i did not wrestle; but removed my shoes, for it is holy ground
the breezes now to escape my touch, and time to continue as time is bent on changing
and all i could think of this sinner: my Lord, my Lord, why did you not abandon me?

I am a dream of the dust, and to dust I shall return, upon its waking. For a few moments the universe gets to peer at itself through these eyes of mine, for some scant instances the universe gets to wonder about what it might be. It is an amazing thing, ephemeral. Even if it happens the billions of times that it does, one must not lose sight of its miracle. For never again will this thing I call “I” ever appear on this blue dot in the cosmos. Life is an experiment in uniqueness: grouped together as similar are the millions, but each one is exquisitely its own. God has blessed us all to the point where we no longer notice the wonder of it all. I think it part of the plan. And those who consider why may glimpse the nature of love.

Max Ernst: Birth of a Galaxy

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From the crude cry which we have so often heard during the war years: “If there is a God, why doesn’t He stop Hitler?,” to the unspoken questioning in many a Christian heart when a devoted servant of Christ dies from accident or disease at what seems to us a most inopportune moment, there is this universal longing for God to intervene, to show His hand, to vindicate His purpose. I do not pretend to understand the ways of God any more than the next man; but it is surely more fitting as well as more sensible for us to study what God does do and what He does not do as He works in and through the complex fabric of this disintegrated world, than to postulate what we think God ought to do and then feel demoralized and bitterly disappointed because He fails to fulfill what we expect of Him.

embers of a dream, and firelight
the years slouch on, the world becomes shorter as we age
from the ground lifted, forgetting our yesterday’s weight
(did we even exist in that ambiguous time?)
faith in my inmost inmost fires
home to a thousand unnamed words, a vocabulary of silence
compelled by the illusion of time to accelerate my wondering
(imagine time, wrapped around itself: a rose)
we live our lives shrouded in sound
darkness slips from our grasping; we hold nothing at all
the transience of the dream, glances off our perceptions
(returned from nowhere, the moment is blank)

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

– Bob Dylan

to follow the trail by the faintest scratches in the dirt
shall we believe in infinite silence, in the before and the after?
swimming in our senses when the swirl of whispers becomes too much
i see life shifted red, in the distance we feed in our busyness
hidden in the light like an unknown angel shall we drive the point
into the storm shall we follow in the footsteps of immortals
emerging from the fray to a field of vast quiet, in twilight
i trust the hands of strangers with all my precious dreams…
fear not! light has never been an illusion, nor does darkness exist
and death cannot calculate deeply enough to zero our voice

Philip K. Dick described God as being found in the trash layer of the world. This struck me as having a high content of truth. What are we to make of that statement? Why would this be? For is not God found above the highest heaven? Is not Heaven God’s throne, and earth merely a footstool? Yet I look back, when He visited this world, and showed His true nature. He came not to rule, but to serve, the reason why almost all the Jews rejected Him as the messiah. He was the opposite of what they were expecting — the Suffering Servant, not the conquering king. This, too, I find thinking has a significant quality of truth to it. In the very nature of nature we find the surprises that now we don’t think about, like the great dinosaurs all dying out and the lilliputian rodent-like mammal sweeping over as the victor of evolution (for now). Now we do not find it at all unusual that an image of a crucified man, we use to give us strength. Selah.

After the shouting as he rode on a donkey, “Hosanna in the highest!”, what happened then? This is God, your King, o people, come down from on high. This is God with us, our Immanuel. We have waited so long for our Savior to come, and now He comes in peace into the City of Prophets, the city of the Presence, the Temple. Do we make Him, then, King over all the earth? For God so loved the world, that He gave us this man, His only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in Him, it is as if that soul were never to die, even if they were to leave this green world. What can we possibly do for such a man, who saves us even from our own selves? For being the Son of God means that He is God, for one God there is, and so the Son of God must share God’s very nature. God with us.

Must it be that the stone the builders rejected become the cornerstone? What is to be if He were given to the archons of the Temple, the elders? Will they not pay Him tribute? Or will they pass Him along to become like a curse, and “for the good of the many, is one sacrificed”? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) What do they say has the crowd demanded, if it can be believed? One thinks it no small thing that those who cheered this King of the Jews now turn away, afraid. Who are we, now, leading Him to His final fate, through the streets of Jerusalem? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) Who is it now, who asks for forgiveness for those who slay Him? Who is being raised upon a tree, upon a cross? Who have we crucified, for all of the world and people and eternity and angels to see? Who? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) It is God. And we have thrown him away….

i imagine fingers emanating the aroma of wine
like a whisper that things are not as they seem
i am a subversive truth, with hints of another world
verily, have i dreamed so very often?
i cry out that darkness will not withstand our fire
but these are only candles that we wield
symmetries broken as we learn to doubt
though will i find asylum in the memory of my rose
time is a vagrant air we ignore till it becomes deadly
swirl the possibilities till they all assemble
in magic does life imagine the smallest of destinies
and i breathed of the high smoke of eternity
to return, still me, wearing the soul of a saint

Mordecai Ardon: The Red Dew

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If you have in mind to make sense of things, as you might, you should go the path of faith and reason. If you need to pick one of the two, pick reason; but if both are available to you, put faith first. Further, if you go deeply enough into reason, you will end up in the parlor of science. All that science is is that it means you’re indeed deadly serious about wanting to make sense of things. If it can be measured, and if a proper mathematics can be developed around it, science can make sense of it. Unfortunately, we do not as yet have any way of measuring God, or in fact, anything of the spirit world (not even imaginary things are as yet susceptible to science’s calipers, as of this writing, and the spirit world is definitely more subtle in nature). This may not always be so, however. Stay tuned.

So as it happens that more of the world is unexplained rather than explained, it is wise to rely on faith. Just make sure that the source of your faith is tested, and you’re basically good to go. Not that you’ll never make mistakes. For Heaven’s sake. The best science is prone to mistakes, and you think your faith is miraculously bulletproof? Have realistic expectations, especially about faith. And then, if you go deeply enough into faith, you will hit the height of sainthood, which I think is pretty much universally acclaimed as a “way to be”, if we’re talking the real deal. It was thus I set a goal for myself in this life: to be a scientist saint. I might actually get there, too. That’s sort of a scary thought.

in the vastness of alone am i a pebble in the desert
the society of my mind has its infidels, bent on war
(i hover: a center, a dreamlike quiet stills my know)
a madness so perfectly designed, as to make one sane
i breathed in the vapors of time, as to make one wise
drifted from island to island in imaginary eternities
(i have seen out this window the dreaming pass by)
the vision pours from my eyes, formless and void
words spoken in solitude return to infinite silence

Thomas a Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, “A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.” The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr’s stake or noose into a place of coronation.

One interesting vision I had was of how the elements gain their characteristics. It appeared in my mind while I was in Brooklyn, at a Throbbing Gristle concert, which I was invited to by my Russian friend, Boris. We had just had dinner, and I had had a drink during that, plus I was taking some cold medicine. So, on something of an altered state of mind, I saw the various elements in simple models, and what different electron “shells” they had (“shells” in quotes because it is a rather antiquated concept, but one that best describes how we can understand an atom’s interface). We realize that one only interacts with an atom via those “shells”. The nucleus pretty much only gives an atom its mass.

If we understand that elements behave the way they do, when encountering other elements or more of the same element, because of the structure of their electron “shells”, we understand the façade of their emergence to be the fundamental structure to what qualitatively we experience of any substance at all. The factors that are determined by placement of electrons emerge by their bonding to other elements, or the same, and the resultant molecular arrangements make emergent larger scale behavior and experientials of elemental substance and molecular structures. The devil is in the details, God is the God of small things. That is how fine tuned the qualities are of that which we call physical reality: the humming of the electrons sing into being all of creation.