Moonlit musing
I was awake far too early again this morning. My bedroom is uncurtained save for a fine gauze that drapes the window allowing the moonlight in and dream-filled eyes to look out. The sky was dark when I woke and there were no stars to see as they were hidden behind cloud and mist. I had been half awake for some time, thinking about stars… and that state on the edge of dream holds some strange concepts.
The thoughts were not new… are any thoughts truly original?… and I wondered how many human beings have paused on the edge of slumber to consider the stars that wheel overhead every night, unregarded by most of us, most of the time.
I wondered about stars. We know there are planets… suns… galaxies… billions of the things twinkling away up there. To us they are just ‘stars’ most of the time. We assume we understand them to a certain degree, knowing what they are made of. Yet does that mean we really know what they are?
Look, I was half asleep…and my sons will happily remind you of the word ‘weird’….
I thought about water. H2O… everybody knows that. We all know what water is… how it is made.. two hydrogen atoms to every oxygen atom, etc… We know what it looks like, feels like, where it comes from, what we use it for, what we need it for… but do we know what it actually ‘is’?
Every culture, every people… even any writer who has touched on these things… has created their own mythology of the stars to explain their nature. Long before telescopes and spacecraft we ‘knew’ what the stars were. They were gods and heroes, mythical creatures… the souls of the dead. They were angelic beings, divine lights in the sky…They were, in my somnolent state, the souls of the departed, rainbow fragments of being awaiting rebirth…Pinpricks in the map of heaven that let the Light shine through, showing us that there was something beyond the world we live in.
I suppose I wasn’t questioning the nature of the stars as much as the nature of reality. And how the time and place of our birth on history’s pages colours our perception and understanding of that reality.
In this era of science and fact, of wondrous discoveries about the natural world around us, I wonder if we have lost something of the magical landscape our forefathers knew? Were they closer to the true nature of water, perhaps, when they saw it as sacred? By knowing the chemical composition of water and its cycle we are able to understand its physical nature, it is true, and it enables us to see clearly the impact our own species is having on the world for good or ill.
But perhaps we are no closer to understanding what anything actually ‘is’? I think we just like to comfort ourselves with knowledge and call it understanding.
Just think about it a moment… what are you? What am I? Are we simply the bodies we inhabit and in which we move through the inculated reality of the world? Are we more.. or less… than our thoughts and emotions, aspirations and dreams? Behind all those there is that indefinable something that is ‘you’… that unique and unfathomable ingredient that makes us all different… Even identical twins raised together have their own unique note in the symphony of life.
Perhaps reality is simply whatever we believe it to be? Most of us never question that an apple is an apple, a wall just a wall… Indeed, as children that incessant ‘why’ is often silenced with an exasperated ‘It just is, okay?’ and we cease to ponder reality, simply learning the rules to move through its observed parameters the same as everyone else, agreeing a reality by consensus.
The odd thing is that as soon as you begin to question the true nature of the smallest grain of sand it throws everything else into question and possibilities emerge that bring the magic back to life. You have to wonder if our very acceptance brainwashes us into blindness, so that we fail to see the marvels and mysteries hidden in plain sight in a world we think we know.
The mind wanders odd pathways in that half state when the body sleeps while the mind is wakeful. Through mine this morning a phrase from an old ritual meandered, seeming to make an abstract kind of sense… that we are ‘the marvellous seed of the stars’. The image that rose in my mind was one of a wondering beauty and if we create our reality ourselves, I think I’m going with that one.
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.
~ Chief Seattle, 1854 ~
The thoughts were not new… are any thoughts truly original?… and I wondered how many human beings have paused on the edge of slumber to consider the stars that wheel overhead every night, unregarded by most of us, most of the time.
I wondered about stars. We know there are planets… suns… galaxies… billions of the things twinkling away up there. To us they are just ‘stars’ most of the time. We assume we understand them to a certain degree, knowing what they are made of. Yet does that mean we really know what they are?
Look, I was half asleep…and my sons will happily remind you of the word ‘weird’….
I thought about water. H2O… everybody knows that. We all know what water is… how it is made.. two hydrogen atoms to every oxygen atom, etc… We know what it looks like, feels like, where it comes from, what we use it for, what we need it for… but do we know what it actually ‘is’?
Every culture, every people… even any writer who has touched on these things… has created their own mythology of the stars to explain their nature. Long before telescopes and spacecraft we ‘knew’ what the stars were. They were gods and heroes, mythical creatures… the souls of the dead. They were angelic beings, divine lights in the sky…They were, in my somnolent state, the souls of the departed, rainbow fragments of being awaiting rebirth…Pinpricks in the map of heaven that let the Light shine through, showing us that there was something beyond the world we live in.
I suppose I wasn’t questioning the nature of the stars as much as the nature of reality. And how the time and place of our birth on history’s pages colours our perception and understanding of that reality.
In this era of science and fact, of wondrous discoveries about the natural world around us, I wonder if we have lost something of the magical landscape our forefathers knew? Were they closer to the true nature of water, perhaps, when they saw it as sacred? By knowing the chemical composition of water and its cycle we are able to understand its physical nature, it is true, and it enables us to see clearly the impact our own species is having on the world for good or ill.
But perhaps we are no closer to understanding what anything actually ‘is’? I think we just like to comfort ourselves with knowledge and call it understanding.
Just think about it a moment… what are you? What am I? Are we simply the bodies we inhabit and in which we move through the inculated reality of the world? Are we more.. or less… than our thoughts and emotions, aspirations and dreams? Behind all those there is that indefinable something that is ‘you’… that unique and unfathomable ingredient that makes us all different… Even identical twins raised together have their own unique note in the symphony of life.
Perhaps reality is simply whatever we believe it to be? Most of us never question that an apple is an apple, a wall just a wall… Indeed, as children that incessant ‘why’ is often silenced with an exasperated ‘It just is, okay?’ and we cease to ponder reality, simply learning the rules to move through its observed parameters the same as everyone else, agreeing a reality by consensus.
The odd thing is that as soon as you begin to question the true nature of the smallest grain of sand it throws everything else into question and possibilities emerge that bring the magic back to life. You have to wonder if our very acceptance brainwashes us into blindness, so that we fail to see the marvels and mysteries hidden in plain sight in a world we think we know.
The mind wanders odd pathways in that half state when the body sleeps while the mind is wakeful. Through mine this morning a phrase from an old ritual meandered, seeming to make an abstract kind of sense… that we are ‘the marvellous seed of the stars’. The image that rose in my mind was one of a wondering beauty and if we create our reality ourselves, I think I’m going with that one.
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.
~ Chief Seattle, 1854 ~
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