Month: September 2014

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JSW Prompt – 9/1/2014

These are the things I no longer wish to understand….

 

Like peace and friendship and the reason for rising every morning.  Peace ain’t nothing but a word nobody believes in anymore.  I’ve never seen it in my life.  Ever, and I’m not young anymore. Men don’t want peace, not if it interferes with the endless wars bounding this universe. Far easier to kill and maim and destroy than to open a hand or a heart; understand that the man across the border isn’t really different on the inside.  We all want food and shelter and to be loved.  Why can’t we just talk?

But then talking ain’t been man’s strong suit, at least not in my lifetime.  Take Old Earth.  Hear tell it used to be  sight to see but now nothing is left but dark waters and bloated lands.  Millions lost.  Millions of millions.

And it hasn’t stopped since.

 

 

 

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“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ― Carl Sagan

The more I think about this quote, the more I am fascinated by the awe-inspiring possibilities of the statement.  To think that the cosmos lies within us is contrary to everything we have ever been taught.  We are told that the cosmos is out there, beyond the curve of the horizon, beyond poor demoted Pluto, out somewhere in the Milky Way, trapped between the ever expanding ‘boundaries’ of the Big Bang.  Yet Mr Sagen suggests that all that infinity is instead inside of us? Our moral, boundried bodies? How can that be?

Is the tiny speck of the Big Bang hiding somewhere down in our souls, radiating out stars and planets and even black holes through ribs and muscles and lungs?  Or is the universe reversing inside us, growing smaller and smaller with each step we take to make this world a smaller place?

I can image my body filled with the ‘reality’ of blood and muscles and bones, but I have a much harder time with the image of myself filled with star-stuff.    What exactually makes up this star-stuff?  Astroids and space dust? Black holes?  Wormholes?  Matter and dark matter?  Or could it be all of these together just as in the vast unknown of the Universe.

I remember a book cover I once saw that has a person’s outline filled with the dark of sky and stars.  That is how I imagine myself filled with the stuff of the cosmos.  And this, I know, is only but a tiny fraction of what the words mean.  Maybe I will never understand the reality of Mr Sagen’s words, but I will spend my life trying.  That, after all, is the most anybody can expect.