Category Archives: Earth

Am I wave or particle? Light or matter?
Maybe it all depends on what we use to measure.
We measure and measure and measure.
Our instruments get finer, more accurate, deeper and deeper
into mysteries created by the very act of measuring.
We are in awe the further that we go.
Perhaps we will get to a point where all of our re-searching fuses—
geometry, physics, biology, poetry, theology—
into something we cannot behold, and we will be back
to where we began,
at the pin-point of all curiosity and wonder and awe.
I heard a quantum physicist on the radio, John Polkinghorne.
He said that creation—birth, life—happens on the edges.
An edge that is not completely random
and not completely predictable.
If this cloudy edge, like a coastline or a fractal, is where God brings into fruition—
which is also the point where we plant seeds, compost, and bake bread with wild yeast—
then in terms of human communities, it is the margins where we find God
to partner and bring into fullness of life, the place where life is uncertain,
where people are more dependent on earth and each other for survival,
which is, in its nature, both rhythmic and unpredictable.
That is where we are alive!

To fully experience the earth,
the moon, people, music, love, God,
takes all of us.
I mean ALL of us.
Splintering into stars, into dust.
We are splinters of the same star story,
so we need all cultures, all faiths,
all stories, all living beings
to catch even a glimpse of the whole.
Newborns are splinters of parents,
grandparents, great-grandparents and on and on,
never diminishing but increasing in complexity and wonder
with every splinter.
Darwin’s great insight was the splintering
of birds, fish, insects, humans.
A recipe book splinters food, people, memories,
liked stained glass, mosaics,
like sun through a prism,
we are all splintered and it’s OK.
That’s why we need each other,
why we can never
know fully,
love completely,
if we insist on being alone.

Sometimes, when I dig into compost, I try to understand the universe—I know, but it’s true.
I try to understand that this hollow rhizome I hold in my hand,
once an iris, emptied by worms,
motionless,
“dead,”
is no less alive than me.
That here, where the sun shines on my bent-over-back, and I feel the warmth of it,
that here in the Present is not just a passing feeling,
but some glimmer of
Truth.
The sun warms the soil, seeds sprout, I consume them along with star particles,
super nova dust,
and somehow
I live and
breathe.
That this planet is explosion inverted, star catastrophy united into soil, water, rhizome, worm.
I am, literally,
dust.