Small.
Tiny.
Minuscule.
Inconsequential.
Ok, maybe not inconsequential exactly, but really really small and petty is the theme here.
Its a thought I want you to keep reminding yourself to bathe your thoughts with.
Everything on this earth, all our little ideas about our seemingly huge world, all our wants, needs, desires, hopes, fears, hell, I could go on for days here. It's all small. Very very small. Like a mouse fart in a hurricane, only smaller. But I digress....
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The first thing to do is put this book down.
WAIT!
Not just yet.
Of course if you've followed my orders, I'm talking to myself. The fact that you're reading this tells me you already know the second thing to do, and that's never follow my orders. I don't give orders, only suggestions. Feel free to tell me to go take a flying leap at any time if you don't like my suggestions, but don't assume that I mean to presume to give anyone orders.
So, let me suggest that you put this book down on a clear night with no clouds, when the pinpricks of light in the sky begin to twinkle and differentiate themselves from one another, or, for the less poetically inclined, when the stars and all their glory are viewable. This may require a drive/train ride/elevator lift depending on where you spend your evenings, but it's worth it. Next, go outside away from bright lights, and find a quiet-ish place to be for a few minutes. Then bend your neck backwards and look up. I'm hoping by then you will have closed this book, and aren't trying to read it while you drink in the stars, or this next bit will be difficult to understand and might possibly even hurt your neck and eyes.
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Now I don't mean here to tell you what to see, for philosophically I would have to scoop out your eyes and brain, all your memories and perceptions, and replace them with mine to do so. I do however mean to tell you what to look for.
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That.
Is.
Not.
A black dome with lights on it.
Every one of those stars is a different distance from you. Some relatively close, and some ridiculously far away. Some of them aren't even stars, but whole galaxies. Let your mind allow them to take on distance. For this exercise, true spatial relationships are not needed and would certainly take more than just one book written by a non-mathematician to explain. So let the bright stars be closer, and the faint ones be far away.
I say let because our mind wants to paint them all relatively equidistant. Tell it to stop that childish behavior, and let space be space. If you're doing this correctly, you probably want to straighten your neck for a few seconds, because seeing the stars can be dizzying at best. Nauseating at worst. Which is why our brains try so hard to make the stars behave in a more sensible manner than they do.
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If you didn't start flat on your back, or end up there the hard way, I'd like you to look at the nearest tree/building/car/frog etc and then back up again, whilst contemplating size and distance.
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If you can see Orion in your wintry sky, look at the center star of the three that make up his sword.
That's not a star.
Its a nebula.
Allow me to let NASA's website describe it to us.
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Just below Orion's belt, the hilt of his sword holds a great jewel in the sky, the beautiful Orion Nebula . Bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, a small telescope or even binoculars show the nebula to be a few tens of light-years' wide complex of gas and dust, illuminated by several massive and hot stars at its core, the famous Trapezium stars .However, the heart of this nebula also conceals a secret from the casual observer. There are in fact about one thousand very young stars about one million years old within the so-called Trapezium Cluster , crowded into a space less than the distance between the Sun and its nearest neighbour stars.
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Wikipedia says this about it;
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The Orion Nebula is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely studied celestial features. The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have directly observed protoplanetary disks, brown dwarfs, intense and turbulent motions of the gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars in the nebula. There are also supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing through the dense hydrogen clouds of the Orion Nebula. Each bullet is ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit and are tipped with iron atoms glowing bright blue. They were probably formed one thousand years ago from an unknown violent event.
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Here's a tiny little picture of it.
This thing is big.
Huge.
Let me try to decipher.
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The nebula is 'tens of light years wide'. That's somewhere between 10 and 100 in astronomer's terms.
Light years. This one's gonna take some big numbers, but don't worry I won't be asking you to do anything mathematical, don't even really read the numbers, just look at how many digits they have. A light year is a distance explained as ~the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year~. Light travels at 670 616 629 miles per hour, in a vacuum. This makes a light year measure around 5,878,630,000,000 miles.
The Orion Nebula is 'tens' of these wide. Tens.
Did I mention how big this thing is?
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I know, it's too big. can't wrap the mind around it. It looks like a star from here to me too.
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Again, this is the mind trying to force it to make sense to a person who isn't conditioned to see past their own city or state or country some days. It'll come though. When it does I'd recommend that you be sitting.
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If that concept is too big, lets try the 'supersonic bullets' mentioned above. They're tiny compared to the nebula. They're only ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit. That's piddlingly tiny, right? Much fewer digits anyway. Let me give you a picture of size for reference, something that will make more sense to the mind.
Your table is the Sun. I know, it's not hot and you don't get radiation burns from dinner, but work with me here. Your dining or kitchen table is the sun. If you walk out to the center of the street in front of your house/apartment/hovel and place a peppercorn or green pea on the ground and call it 'Earth' you'll have a rough approximation of relative size and distance.
Next make your way to the nearest Starbucks (unless you live in rural Kansas or the like (and if so, I'm sorry), in which case the nearest paved road will do) and grab a coffee. Now you're roughly where Pluto is in relation to your table, or, the Sun as it has become.
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That's just radius.
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Double that and you have 'the diameter of Pluto's orbit' in smaller terms.
Millions of times smaller. Terms your mind can cope with. The actual orbit of Pluto is 7,108,536,267.4 miles.
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There are shock waves TEN times that size rushing through the nebula 'tipped with iron atoms glowing bright blue'.....
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Tiny.
And that coffee won't stop that dizzy feeling you're getting.
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Once you get back home, if it hasn't been run over, eaten, or sown into the rural Kansas soil, look at your little Earth model. If you can, put a dot on it with a pen or pencil to represent the state/country you live in.
Next time you go out to see the stars take it with you.
The Orion Nebula is just one of those dizzying pinpricks of light that look like stars in the sky. It has its own pinpricks within it. It has shock waves running through it that would strip the atmosphere off the Earth and extinguish the flames of the Sun forever in an instant without skipping a beat.
And those stars resolving into their distances for you, showing you the depth of the universe? You can only see what the Earth itself isn't blocking from your view, under your feet, more of this space. Tons of it.
On all sides.
Not just above you, but all around you. We float in it, suspended in a matrix of gravitation and velocity. Circling one of those little lights once a year.
I hope you're sitting.
Because that tiny tiny tiny dot on your Earth model means absolutely nothing to the universe around you. Tiny wars waged by petty people, religious and philosophical arguments over ideas and location mean exactly ZERO, and are more temporary than mayflies. We tend to forget how blessed we are to even exist.
And in this lies the crux of the matter, blessings. In a universe so cold, so far away, so huge, so patently scientific and math-y, how can a God exist to care one whit about us, let alone bless us?
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When I bend my neck and look up into the night skies, and I let my mind allow the stars to slide into a semblance of distance and depth, I answer.
"You're lookin' at him, kid."
Physically.
For real.
Not just as a metaphor, but God Himself. Or Herself. However you view IT.
We are 'of God' and 'in God's image' and 'God's children' not because God spat us out, or threw us against a canvas, but because we exist as God.
In God.
With God. Part of, integral to, inseperable from, ARE God.
Allow me to elaborate...
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