A Deep-Dive Through Time and Space

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Consciousness, Earth, here and now, humanity, inner-space, outer-space, paradox, photography, quantum physics, space, time, universe, Webb Space Telescope

Deep space, 13 billion years ago. Photo From Webb Space Telescope

By now you’ve probably seen the stunning new images from the Webb Space Telescope, which takes us 13 billion years back in time. That’s 8 billion years before the Earth was born. We stand here now looking back at a time before there was ground to stand on, or a human consciousness to see or grasp anything at all. We are looking at a speck of sky no bigger than a grain of sand, they say, yet filled with millions of galaxies and trillions of stars, and who knows how many planets or moons or intelligent life-forms looking back. Only they wouldn’t see us. For we don’t exist yet.

It’s mind-boggling. And certainly puts the turmoil we’re experiencing here on Earth into a new perspective. No less urgent or relevant for our fire-fly timespans. But it points us away from the personal and relative “here and now” into one that is infinitely larger than our selves and the tiny blue marble we call home. Our “here and now” encapsulates not only the present moment but the “here and now” 13 billion years ago. We are the link that spans that distance through time and space. Our consciousness. Mine. Yours. Now. Enfolding all that. Surely it means something significant.

When we turn the eye inward rather than out, into the micro-universe of atoms and particles swirling inside us and everything that exits, we grasp a new paradox. Quantum physics has shown us that those inner worlds at the most infinitesimal level exist only as clouds of potentiality rather than as concrete substance. These clouds of potentiality only become “real”—that is, fixed in time and space—when observed. Unseen they exist only within a hazy realm of the possible.

In comparison to the infinite universe swirling around us and inside us, we humans may seem pathetically insignificant. Not worth a mention in the footnotes of atomic and astronomic legers of Science. And yet we seem to play an essential and outsized role.

Without the human mind to grasp the universe there would be no universe to be grasped. Our bodies may have been evolved from star-dust. But it’s our minds, our own conscious grasping of such, that moves “star-dust,” and all else, out of the realm of the potential and into the realm of the real.

Such is the circular and utterly paradoxical wonder of a world we live in.

The cloudy realm from which stars are born. Photo from the Webb Space Telescope.

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Dancing Through Time and Space, Pinching Ourselves Awake

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inspiration, Jimmy Buffet, life, music, personal, Philosophy, travel

As you read this, I’ll have flown across the Atlantic and landed in Madrid. I may be strolling through the Prado marveling at the artwork, climbing castle steps in Segovia, or sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe in Paris.

It all sounds like a fairy tale to me now, sitting here tapping out this post to the beat of Jimmy Buffet’s “Trip around the Sun.” Wondering at the wonders to come.

Our whole lives are like this, spinning through time and space on this tiny planet. Traveling through a transient present, glancing back at the slide show of our past, gazing forward into a hazy future full of airy phantoms zooming toward us.

Who knows how this all will unfold?

“We’ll have to keep pinching ourselves to believe we are really there,” says my cousin who I’ll be traveling with.

And so should we all, every day of our lives. To keep present in the moment, right here, right now, before it slips into the past. Before the future with all its airy uncertainty settles around us like a warm blanket and slowly unravels into mere memory.

This life is too loose, too swift, too fluid, to do anything but marvel at its passing, to be dazzled with dizziness as the earth spinning beneath our feet spins around the sun.

Sometimes I think I must keep dancing in place just to keep up.

If only we could live every moment of our lives as tourists, pinching ourselves awake.

I’ll leave you with the song I’ve been listening to.

Recognition for “Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

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abstract art, art, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

I entered a local art show for the first time this month and was surprised and pleased to get recognition for my work, one of my personal favorites. I wrote about this work a few months ago, my first abstract painting, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Later I wrote about how I came to name it, although I “renamed” it for this show. The theme was “Light” so I called it “Light Swirl at the Edge of Time,” still fitting, I think (smile).

I used watercolor and oil pastel. so it was entered under a broad category of 3D, glass, and mixed media. During my turn as docent for the show one rainy day last week, I shot a few photos.

I’ve been doing more writing than painting these last few months. But the few I’ve worked on have all been watercolor and oil pastel. I love the texture it creates in combination, the way the watercolor washes over and puddles between the oil marks, the way the pastel adds sparkle, and how the two together sometimes gives the work an almost mosaic quality.

I’ll share some of these later, but for now my little “Swirl” gets center stage.

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

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abstract, abstract art, art, creative process, creativity, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time” watercolor and oil pastel by Deborah J Brasket

This naming of this painting did not come “like a conversation between two lovers,” as the name of my last painting did.  The one came suddenly, serendipitously, like a gift.

While pondering what to call this painting, I opened a post by the Humble Fabulist and saw this whimsical painting by Rothko, and it’s equally whimsical naming. I fell in love with the name.  “Slow swirl at the Edge of the Sea.”

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944. Oil on canvas || Mark Rothko

Having had such a long romance with the sea, it conjured up all sorts of ideas and images that I immediately wanted to paint, a whole series, I thought.

But then I glimpsed my unnamed painting waiting so patiently there, propped on top a bookcase, leaning against a wall.

In another post writing about the process of painting it I wrote:

In the end, this piece reminds me of the night sky, with its swirling galaxies, shooting stars, and so on.  Although intentionally, as hat wasn’t what I had started out to create, I think my love for the night sky, that mystery and romance, was expressed here subconsciously.

All that deep blue and turquoise and swirling motion still makes me think of deep space, the edge of the universe, the end of time, and how in reality there is no “edge,” no “end” to any of it.  The thought of that “endlessness” seems to swirl around and around in our minds because we cannot quite grasp the fact of it.

So I knew then what the painting was trying to tell me, and so named it.

But the idea of a series of paintings about the sea, the ocean, remains. About what it brings up out of me, the gifts it lays at our feet, the ease its motion gives our eyes, our bodies, our minds. It’s unfathomable depths and expanses. It’s hidden treasures.

I’m keen to see what this idea will bring forth.

Sensuous Sunday: Air, an Enigma

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Air, David Abram, enigma, life, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, quotation, The Spell of the Sensuous

“What a mystery is the air, what an enigma to these human senses! On the one hand , the air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and esophagus to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, my self. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.

Yet the air, on the other hand, is the most outrageous absence known to this body. For it is utterly invisible. . . .

[T]his unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to live. . . . What the plants are quietly breathing out, we animals are breathing in; what we breathe out, the plants are breathing in. The air, we might say, is the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, and this a key to the forgotten presence of the earth.”

From The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram

Nature and Consciousness – Seeing Things as They Are

Tags

Consciousness, Metaphysics, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, reality, Science, spirituality

© Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I write about nature I get deep into human consciousness. You can’t really separate the two. There is no “nature” – no way to identify, quantify, categorize, articulate, or understand it—apart from human consciousness, from how we think and talk about it.

We can’t study or explore or write about nature as something separate from ourselves, our own senses and experiences, our own thinking, perceiving, observations, experimentation. In that sense, nature is subjective, no matter how hard we try to objectify it.

This is not new, of course. Better writers and thinkers, from different disciplines, have explored this in more depth and detail that I can here.

This grand book the universe . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it: without these, one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.  —Galileo, Astronomer

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from the experience of the world . . . .  –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologist

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. –Edward Sapir, Linguist

If the world exists and is not objectively solid and preexisting before I come on the scene, then what is it? The best answer seems to that the world is only a potential and not present without me or you to observe it. . . . All of the world’s many events are potentially present, able to be but not actually seen or felt until one of us sees or feels.  –Fred Allen Wolf, Physicist

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
-–Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. –John Muir, Naturalist

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the processions of the seasons. There is nothing . . . with which I am not linked.  –Carl Jung, Psychologist

See this rock over there? This rock’s me!  –Australian Aborigine

But in the ordinary play of our day, we forget this. We experience everything outside ourselves as “not me,” “alien,” “other.” Even our own bodies are commonly experienced as “not me.” We say “my stomach growled,” or “my foot fell asleep,” or “my sinuses are acting up,” because they seem to act involuntarily, with a mind of their own, without our conscious consent. As does nature, and other people, and the things we create—toasters and cars and computers.

Separating the whole of life and existence into parts is a useful way of talking and thinking about things.

But too often we fail to put everything back together and see how interdependent it all is, how embedded we are in the whole, and the whole in us. When we fail to do so we lose a vital understanding of ourselves and the universe, and we act in ways that may be harmful to the whole.

The see the ocean in a drop of water, to see ourselves in everyone we meet, is not, as some think, merely a poetic and rosy way of looking at the world. It’s to see things as they actually are.

Original posted 8-9-2012

Music for Sailing Among the Stars

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music, poetry, sailing, Sea of Cortez, Stars, Troy Armstrong, universe

One of my poems has been set to music. An amazing composer, Troy Armstrong, emailed me earlier this year and told me how he had found one of my early blog posts called “Swimming Among the Stars,” which featured a poem I had written long ago. He was so moved by the poem he set it to music.

His choral piece is called “Swimming Among the Stars,” and while I was thrilled and honored that he should do such a thing, I was blown away by the song itself, which is hauntingly beautiful. You can listen to it at the link above.

While it’s meant to be sung and he’s working on having it recorded by a choral group, what you hear below is from a synthesizer. Even so it’s incredible . . . tell me what you think. I’m so deeply humbled by it. You might want to visit his website and hear more of his music. Some created for orchestra, string quartets, solo instruments, and voice.

The poem and part of the post that inspired this music is copied below, or you can read the original here, which included a night swim. It was written when we were sailing across the Sea of Cortez one moonless night. Here’s what I wrote in that post:

We sail across the universe on the back of a tiny planet at the edge of a galaxy that swirls around us. Too often we forget that–how embedded we really are in the universe.

I became acutely aware of this one night when we were crossing the Sea of Cortez from Baja to mainland Mexico. There was no wind, no moon. The sea was perfectly still like the surface of a dark mirror, marred only by our trailing wake.

Above us the bare mast stirred a billion stars, which were reflected in the sea’s surface below. I felt like we were on a starship sailing through the cosmos. Later that night I wrote this:

Night Crossing, Sea of Cortez

The sea appears so simple
With a dark, indulgent face
The stars there twice reflected
Like a world spun out of space
Our sloop shoots through the cosmos
Through a mute and moonless night
Our wake a fiery comet
Streaming effervescent light
With all the universe inert
We slip from star to star
Then reach across the Milky Way
Toward galaxies afar
Eons swirl, light-years unfurl
And none can still our flight
Leaping toward the infinite
To apprehend the light.

I’m not alone in seeing the overlap between the ocean and the night sky. Various artists are fond of depicting whales and dolphins and other sea creatures swimming among the stars.

The ocean and the universe stand at the edge of the wild, the last two true frontiers we have to explore, except for the human consciousness, of course. The ocean and the universe have become symbols for consciousness as well as adventure.

We seem to grasp that there is something that connects all three—some deep, dreamy, ever-flowing, ungraspable, powerful yet nurturing element in which we all are steeped. That calls us to move beyond ourselves, beyond the safe and familiar, the already known. That inspires us to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp.

I’m still reaching. Are you?

The Joy of Aging

Tags

Aging, Growing old, inspiration, Joy, New York Times, Oliver Sack, short story

Oliver Sacks wrote a piece for the New York Times last month called “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding!)”. It ended with this:

“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

While I am still a long ways from 80, I’m beginning to feel this way more and more too. If this is aging, I hope it never ends!

I just finished a short story on this subject–my first flash fiction, 300 words! It’s called “Us, Ancient.” I can’t share much here because I’m sending it out to some journals and they frown on that sort of thing. But excerpts, I understand, are fine.

So here’s the first and last lines. See if you can guess what comes in the middle.

Beginning

“You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.”

Ending

“Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe . . . That’s how I see us.”

I’m not sure what it is about “the universe” I find so inspiring. I’m not alone. Humans have gazed at the stars in awe and wonder since the beginning of time. Perhaps, like me, they feel some strange kinship. They say we’re made of star-dust, after all.

I’ve always felt that’s why I have such an affinity for the sea. Seventy percent of our bodies are water. And that’s where life on earth all began, in the sea. Each human as well begins its life in the womb surrounded by a type of sea water. Amniotic fluid is salty.

They say that the molecules, cells, and even DNA of our bodies have a type of memory. Might that memory carry traces of its beginning at the dawn of time? I like to think so. I’m not sure how else to explain the feeling of deep empathy with the ocean and the night sky–as if I know them well, as if we are old friends, as if once I was rocked to sleep in their arms. As if I’m not done with them yet, and we are only partly parted. Something of me remains in them still.

This is what aging does, I guess. Allows us to slip the reins of reason and rationality into poetic license. I write elsewhere:

“There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore. That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering, maybe, around the body. But more outside than in.”

I feel that way more and more, as if this body that has contained me all these years is slowly evaporating, and I’m becoming freer to be what I always was but never quite realized. A poet called it “mostly Love, now.” Mostly joy works too.

Epitaph for a Tombstone – Exploring Infinity

Tags

Consciousness, death, Immortality, Near-death experience, poetry, Science, spirituality, Tombstone Epitaph

I came across this recently, something I wrote years and years ago.

So much has changed since then, but not this. This sense that something in me was meant to live forever, that a handful of years is just not enough to realize all that I am.

Epitaph for a Tombstone

I am compressed within my skin
Like a time-bomb

There is more to me than time
Allows to be

When the end comes I’ll explode
Like an atom

It is my end to explore
Infinity

I was obsessed with the idea that I would never be able to see, do, be all that I wanted within the time allotted me. That this little life “rounded by a dream” as Shakespeare wrote, was but an interlude, and that I had existed before and will exist well after it ends.

Perhaps that’s why Wordsworth’s lines in “Intimations of Immortality” mean so much to me, that we come into this world “trailing clouds of glory”. The verses found throughout the Bible about being there “when the morning stars first sang together” have a similar deja vu effect on me.

I was on a blog recently where the question of an after-life was being discussed, along with the musings of Thomas Jefferson and Saul Bellow on the subject.

The suggestion was that there is no science to support such speculation, and these musings by learned men were merely a comforting concession to ease the pain of lost loved ones or the anxiety about one’s own impending death. I took a different viewpoint, and wrote this:

I’m very skeptical of what “Science” knows about anything at this point, but especially of what it knows about the mind and consciousness and the thing that sages through the ages have referred to as “soul” or “spirit.” That individual consciousness would just disappear when life leaves the body seems almost more fantastical than if it should continue in some form.

Look at what happens when we turn out the lights at night–consciousness continues to spin out a type of “reality” at least to the one “awake” in the dream, seemingly conscious and aware of himself and others and a world around him. This waking dream we all seem to be part of seems no more real at times than the one I left when the alarm when off.

And when we look at the “new science” and quantum physics, it appears we know less about how this world is fabricated than we had thought, but what it does seem to indicate is that consciousness plays a much larger role in reality than mere physical particles (if the two can be separated!).

I guess all this rambling goes to say I think when it comes to facing our eventual deaths, scientists can tell us nothing of importance, but the great shock of contemplating a blank slate in place of continuing consciousness may be such an affront to reason that it kick-starts a higher sense of perception or intuition, where the continuation of a person’s spirit or soul, or even that of a dog, does not seem so unreasonable after all. Hence Jefferson’s and Bellow’s musings on death.

Just yesterday I read about a new study debunking the claims of those who have had near-death experiences of an after-life (you know, images of a long tunnel with a bright light at the end surrounded by departed loved ones.)

Apparently researchers have discovered that as the brain dies there is a flurry of abnormal activity—lots of bells and whistle going off , neurons going crazy, atoms exploding, that sort of thing (a bit like my poem depicts, don’t you think?).

These frantic falterings cause those near-death experiences, so they speculate. But a cause and effect relationship can go both ways (as we all well know when considering which came first, the chicken or the egg). It could easily be that in those final moments before the brain goes dead it records the experience of our consciousness of crossing over to a new mental landscape beyond this world. That crazy brain activity could be the last gasp, or mental grasping, of the mortal as it perceives a glimpse of immortality.

There’s no way to know for sure, of course. But when the best minds of this world and many cultures across time all seem to have a similar sense of something of ourselves continuing after this life ends, I think we’d be wise not to dismiss this altogether, despite the lack of science to support it.

Science after all is just evolving thought, new ways of perceiving reality, discovering new patterns of evidence that explain the phenomena around us.

And, if true to itself, Science is open-ended as well as open-minded, poised to grasp things that may never have occurred to it yet. Science too, in the end, may be but one way by which we “explore infinity.”

[My apology to readers who received this twice. Some readers had trouble viewing the first post so I reposted it. Please respond to or “re-like” this one.]

O Holy Night – The Sacred and Sublime in Art & Images

Tags

art, Birth of Christ, Charlotte Church, Christmas, Christmas music, O Holy Night, sacred, sublime

I’ve gathered some images, sacred and sublime, to scroll through as you listen to Charlotte Church sing “O Holy Night“, one of my favorite Christmas carols.

I love this song, not only for the haunting melody and beautiful  lyrics, but also because night has always seemed holy to me.

When I walk out beneath the stars on a cold or balmy night, I’m awestruck by such beauty and mystery and magnificence. I feel humbled and incredibly grateful, as if witnessing the hand of the divine writ large across the sky.

The images below are my gift to you. They reflect what this season is all about for me, a sense of the sacred and sublime–scenes of the birth of Christ and families celebrating Christmas.

Photos of spectacular sunsets and winter wonderlands–nature in all her glory.

And finally, images of an infinite universe stretching out and wrapping about the earth as if we were a holy gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Enjoy!

Walters – The Adoration of the Shepherds

Peter Paul Rubens – The Adoration of the Magi

Raphaels Geburt

Paul Gauguin – Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen)

Attributed to Carel Fabritius

Heilige_Familie_und_Hirten_im_Stal

From Christmas throughout Christendom – The Christmas Tree

Viggo Johansen – A Christmas Story

Waiting for Father Christmas – Theodor Hildebrandt

Glorious Sunset

Winter Wonderland

A White Christmas

Blackbirds flock at Nightfall

Image 13

Frosty Trees in Winter Wonderland

Cosmic Skies over Bali

Northern Lights over Greenland

Stars trailing through the night

Earth Rises in the Night

Hubble_Directly_Observes_Planet_Orbiting_Fomalhaut

Night Mist as seen by Hubble

Cartwheel Galaxy

Star_birth_in_Messier_83_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope)

Orion as seen by Hubble

The Milky Way Galaxy

Our home Earth wrapped up in the Milky Way Galaxy