September 28, 2008
Burr Trail, grand Staircase, Utah

I’m in the middle of nowhere, where I seem to have been spending more and more time lately, looking up into the night sky. I heard a stat recently that only something like 10% of North America is able to see the Milky Way Galaxy from their homes. This is due to light pollution; all the energy that we’re projecting back up into a night sky that’s probably confused by our actions. As if it were saying, “I’m trying to show you something, and you’re ruining the show’, we’re like somebody in a movie theater with a spotlight pointed at the screen.

Some six thousand stars are visible to the naked eye, but there are a hundred billion or so in our galaxy alone. And keep in mind that there are billions of other galaxies out there each containing billions of other stars. Mind boggling to say the least.

Anyways sitting here staring at the night sky I am thinking that everything is moving.

Light is traveling at 186,000 miles per second and everything we see is only a product of the reflected light bouncing off it. The Earth is spinning on its axis, as we altogether (Humans, Earth, the Moon) are traveling around the sun at 18 miles per second. So nothing is sitting still. And then if we look into the deeper layers of the here and now we observe that we are all growing older as are all living things around us. The subatomic particles that make all of us up are constantly being rearranged and exchanged with the world around us, and supposedly it takes 7 years for all the cells of our bodies to be exchanged and/or replaced with new ones.

Yet to me here in this moment looking around, things are quite still, relatively speaking. But this is far from reality. We as humans build reality based upon our perceptions, and in fact, according to quantum physics, our perceptions may actually determine the nature of reality itself. In observing reality we are constantly measuring it, and the measurement itself is what determines the reality before us.

“Who is looking at the universe? Put another way, How is the universe being actualized?
The answer comes full circle. We are actualizing the universe. Since we are part of the universe, that makes the universe (and us) self-actualizing.”
– The Dancing Wu Li Masters, An Overview of the New Physics, Pg 87

What I’m really thinking about right now is geological time. I’m thinking about how our lifetimes are just a pinpoint of reality in a vast expanse of time and space. The question becomes, if I were to live for let’s say 100,000 years and experienced that duration relative to that lifespan, would the mountains and desert buttes around me appear to be moving. Would the landscape appear like waves in a geological ocean? If we were to live a vastly different timeframe, we would witness our geological surroundings in a way similar to how we currently witness plant growth. My point is that everything is moving.

And what’s the point of my point? I’m not quite sure, maybe that this universe is a pretty magnificent place. And next time when you’re stuck in traffic or at a job you hate, consider that everything around you is moving, life IS short relatively speaking, and the world that you enter tomorrow, although maybe not apparent, is vastly different from the world of today. Oh and the universe and time, waits for no one, so get on with what you came here to do, or at least try and be happy doing it.

peace,
d