Skip to main content

Look up!


Two nights ago, I had the rare opportunity to look up and see the stars. Millions of them. They dappled the night sky like wayward sprays of silver paint. As I craned my neck back to try to see them all at once, a few winked wryly at me, reminding me of the many things I do not know and the many places I have not seen. They seemed to ask, “What have you learned, child?” and “Where will you go?” As they inspire us to reach, so these stars also humble us, chastise us for keeping our own lights on too bright such that we cannot see their luminosity. We are so bathed in the halogen glows of our own making that we cannot see that pure fire that surrounds us, the wisdom available to us, the beauty beyond us.

(Thierry Cohen from Paris says, "Get out of town!")

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How Now Brown Cow?

No one ever says brown is their favorite color- it's not bright, it's not vibrant, and it's not very beautiful. It is earthy. It is natural. It is skin, soil, butterfly wing, and death. It is, perhaps the deepest color of the earth, as well as the most elevated. How 'bout them brown apples? ~Brown~   What are you that brings sweat to men's brows as they tear you apart, reaping and forcing you to give for centuries? You thirst for the rain, sweet martyr,  while they thirst for your very last fruit. What are you that men will kill thousands of their brethren, holding you hostage along with their own brothers? You must quietly drink the blood they have spilled, weeping silently as they mar your skin with shallow mines. What are you that an exile longs to crawl back to your warm womb rather than seek riches elsewhere?  He will lower his lips in a fervor of final peace as he kisses that which can be his only home. What are you that men shamelessly use you for thei

Originality: A Falsehood, A Goal

Originality: A Falsehood, A Goal Or, Everything (Nothing) is Original   There’s a self-aggrandizing belief in all of us that we are original, that we can create something original. “Original” is a little arrogance we indulge ourselves. Every quip we make, face we give, and dance we release has been done before. How many times have I said something I thought was insanely clever, only to hear it uttered by several other women in the weeks after? There is an essential egotistical quality to everything we do- as though we were the first and the last, as though we have done something groundbreaking. What a shallow snorkel into the human mind tells us is that we largely know what we have been exposed to. I am able to repeat something in a particular manner (either verbatim or slightly modified) because I have seen it or heard it before. Yet part of my human egoism is that I claim it in this moment to be mine. To be new. To be brave.   There are some, in our history, who have cont

Multiple Universes

I have a flash of memory from when I was a child where I was standing in my room looking around. I noticed the bed, the dresser, the bookshelves, and the many things that lay strewn about. I also noted the spaces in the room, the emptiness that was existed between the things. It occurred to me- quite suddenly- that there could be another universe stacked on top the one I was in. I imagined having the vision to see another Poonam busily drawing a picture on the ground, or else another family in my house altogether as I stood there and looked on. Why not? I thought. If the universe is infinite and if the divine is omnipotent, why can’t there be infinite parallel worlds stacked atop one another? Why do I presume to believe I must be able to see or sense them, and take that as the only evidence that they do or do not exist? My human form is limited. I may not be endowed with the ability, the faculty to see or understand such a limitless world. Humbly, I am an amoeba compared to this univ