Always Space

What is the space between?

The entelechy of particle-waves in relationship with each other is to seek out more connections, to move toward one another. At the same time, the universe is, right now, expanding - and more, more, more space[time] emerges.

With so much suffering on our little, lonely planet, I can feel suffocated by the myth that there is a right way to alleviate pain and grow love. I can trap myself with the trick of believing I am never doing or being enough. I can imagine my perceived failure, although a miniscule effort, is a crux of all that is wrong. I can feel the increasing expanse of the cold, infinite universe like the distance between who I am and whatever version of me would be worthy and of service.

But in the dark, as I breathe deeply and feel my lungs filling, I sense something internally swirling and collecting. I marvel at the mix of things both cosmically created in the crucible of stars - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen - and the Earth-hewn oxygen fuelling my element-rich blood that come together in mystery to give rise to ME.

Me, a strange and unique and nearly-impossible happening. This, a moment, an experience, an awareness, in which, when I begin to think on it, even thought and language break down and fall away. We, a collective beyond my imagination, comprised of humans and animals and plants and fungi and elements and other life forms that may or may not be hiding in plain sight - all arising alongside every other thing.

What is coming together at this very small level of the universe?

We are unfathomably bigger and more complex than the bewitching strata of quantum fodder, yet infinitesimally smaller and less overwhelming than the clusters of galaxies in just our region of All That Is. It is a place to be. It is where I am. Insofar as I am striving to do as little harm and as much good as possible in any given moment, I am participating appropriately.

Sometimes, that looks like sitting still in silence while the Sun is at the opposite side of my planet, and pondering, and breathing, and paying attention, simply noticing, with my limited and liminal faculties, what is arising.

What I know for sure is that there is an ache at the center that compels us forth. There's a striving for something else. There's an existential wanderlust that keeps us looking. When we can recognize this common longing and feel it fully, without repressing or numbing or belittling or distracting from it, we can remain curious about what truly nourishes and heals us.

What heals is always love, an impulse to come together.

That impulse to come together - within ourselves, to one another, and in grandiose efforts as an Earth Collective - is what sustains and continues us, what has and holds us, what grants us the grace to be more than we ever thought possible.

In that coming-together, the expanse of a growing universe looks less like a bleak omen and more like an inviting, omnipresent horizon, for the expansion occurs not at some distant edge we will never know - the expansion is EVERYWHERE.

It tells us: There is always enough space-time. There is always room for whatever I am, whatever we are, whatever is becoming. There is limitless potential. There is always something new in our midst to discover, to explore, to celebrate...and to keep us coming together, aligning the parts of things that long to meet.

The remnants of old stars swirl and gather to give birth to new light. The raw material for innovation and inspiration is at our fingertips as the cosmic ancestry we embody, the Earthly legacy we inherit, and the human manifestation we are ever collaboratively creating.

Who are you? Who am I?

Who are we, and what are we making together?

Breathe. Let your life answer.

"If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form...Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin