Category: Astonishment

Abracadabra!

June 5, 2021 / Brian Vandenberg

Consider. . . . . . . . . a tiger.

If I were speaking this, you would experience a silence after “Consider”. And when I eventually spoke again, you would then think of a tiger. Out of the anticipatory silence, the word conjured this remarkable creature—so utterly removed from your immediate experience—into awareness. The word “tiger” is “magic”. It “tricks” you into inhabiting an imaginary experience that overshadows the concrete reality that directly presents itself to your senses.

Language untethers us, liberates us from the immediate, allows us to reference distant things beyond our immediate experience; time travel forward to eternity or back to the Big Bang; contemplate zero and infinity, tennis and tigers, unicorns and utility bills; think about, and conduct, a “dialog” (!) with ourselves. Words have the power to charm, to evoke, to cast a spell. Words—puffs of air—are chants that enchant.¹

We dwell within a reality that is conjured into existence through words. We typically think of enchantment as the experience of being transported into a state of wonderment apart from the mundane reality we navigate in our everyday lives. But our everyday world is defined, orchestrated, governed by words, and our body is habitually attuned to respond to these air-puffs. We dwell within the word meanings; they are grafted onto our brain and viscera evoking immediate, sometimes strong responses usually so automatic we are unaware of how we are being organically influenced and swayed. We live this enchanted life, walking, talking, thinking, feeling it—mesmerized. We experience it so directly and unquestionably that we think those who might suggest we live in a dream world slightly mad.

Collective Spell-Casting

This conjured reality is essential for our individual and collective survival—so essential that our brains are hard-wired to acquire and use language. We are, fundamentally, a social species, born so helpless that we must rely, for many years, on the intense care and attention of adults if we are to survive. As adults, we also cannot survive on our own; we must communicate and collaborate with others. Language makes this possible. Miraculously, our biology primes us, in our early years, to rapidly acquire words, regardless of the language.

Words are cultural covenants that exist before and beyond any individual, enabling those who share the word to inhabit a common intention. We speak through these covenants, breathing life into these ready-made forms, using them to express our personal meanings and intentions. When we “give our word” we make a promise to honor the shared intention of the word. And we “give our word” whenever we converse.

Power of Nonsense

Words are nonsense. Say a word over and over, fast. Doing so strips it of its power to charm, draining its meaning, exposing its sonic absurdity. Learning a foreign language has the same effect only in reverse. It is an act of faith that the nonsense sounds we try so hard to master will, in the right linguistic context, exert their magic. I spent many months laboring to learn basic French in preparation for a two month visit to France. When there I finally was able to utter the rehearsed sounds. . . others responded—as promised! I experienced toddlerhood, saying sounds and being startled and delighted to see others respond to me. It was an “abracadabra” moment.

Words are power. My French gave me power to participate with others in a meaningful way and navigate the simple cultural pathways of everyday engagements. My thrill derived from the remarkable power of words to reach beyond myself and animate reactions in others. I was initially elated: “I can speak French!” Over time, however, I became aware of just how limited I was. Culturally, I was a babe. As I fumbled my way through exchanges, I was met with kindness—not unlike that accorded a young child. I became aware of my vulnerability. I could not command adult authority, could not understand much of what was said or happening around me. I became concerned of being cheated, duped, mislead, and worried that if I was to find myself in a disagreement or situation of some personal consequence, I was a toddler. l discovered what it is like to be a “foreigner,” a migrant, an immigrant, an “alien”. Powerless.

Writing

Now consider writing. The sound-stream of words frozen into visual images no less absurd than the sounds themselves. Time is stopped. The author is disemboweled, a non-present presence made manifest. The words of those not only absent but long-ago dead can now be conjured, speaking to the those now-present and to those yet-to-be-born. Immortality. Unimagined places, ideas, experiences, lives, and so much more, whispered to us across the chasms of time, space, and death. Writing is magic. And those who can read and those who can write—conjurers. No wonder the written word has oft been considered sacred.

So, dear reader, as you read this you bring me to life in your life. Words and writing, conjuring, allowing us to share these personal, private moments together. You—alive. Me—who knows? Abracadabra!

What is Water?

January 7, 2021 / Brian Vandenberg

If you were to ask a fish, “What is water?”, they would likely say, “What the hell are you talking about?”¹ They live in it, are enveloped by it, inhale it; it pervades everything in every moment of their life, so ubiquitous, yet invisible. How would a fish know about water? Not from the currents and surges, as these are simply “the way things are”. Perhaps a clue might come from the experience of non-water, the dangerous seam above that confers light and darkness, imposes severe restrictions to movement and threats to breathing, and offers the prospect of being an edible while pursuing edibles. But, more likely, not.

We are fish of another kind, denizens of a sea of air. We all know what air is, but this insight was not easily gained. The undulation and wave of trees, plants and grasses, and the savage violence of hurricanes, tornados and water spouts have been viewed as obvious evidence of the pervasive presence and power of unseen supernatural spirits. We breathe and can create our own local “blowing wind-storm”, which offers further evidence for how wind and storms must be caused by cosmic forces. Human history is densely populated with gods and demonic spirits of the wind, blowing good fortune and wreaking destruction.

The water-seam, viewed from our looking-down vantage point, does not necessarily clue us to air. Water is a disorienting and potentially dangerous “something”, where we lose our sure-footedness, where creatures of dreams and nightmares glide and thrash, and where we will sink to a quick gasping death or, with considerable effort, remain afloat—for a while.² Water is a “something” that contrasts with our “nothing”. We discovered air as a “something” possessing various components, some deadly, some life-giving, only relatively recently, in the 18^th century.³ This discovery, not coincidentally, occurred as the demon-haunted world was beginning to be illuminated by the candlelight of science.⁴

Another invisible “nothing” is gravity. We, of course, are aware that things have different weight, that some things are heavier than others. Historically, gravity was understood as a quality that inheres in objects. It is also a word used to describe the quality of “seriousness”. It is only recently, relatively speaking, since the 17^th century with Newton’s famous apple-falling-from-a-tree, that we understand it as an all-pervading, invisible force acting on everything; not just on our planet, but in the entire cosmos. Obviously, apples falling from trees, or falling objects of any kind, are not “Eureka!” moments for most of us.⁵ What is signally significant about Newton’s apple is he understood that its fall was not caused by an inherent quality of the apple, but a manifestation of an invisible force between earth and apple.

As I look across our kitchen to our screened porch, “acorn” hummingbirds flutter above the sink (thank you, Mr. Calder⁶), a 2 foot fabric jellyfish and a stained glass sunflower dangle in front of the sliding glass door, and on the porch, a brass wind spinner twirls, wind chimes sing, and glass “bugs” are attached to the screen glow.

Hanging in the window of my upstairs study is a school of tropical fish (thank you, again, Mr. Calder); it is especially delightful to see from the street, suggesting the room is a water-filled aquarium. Two translucent colored glass ornaments and a glass hummingbird are suspended in another window. Our living room also has 3 translucent glass ornaments in a window and another is suspended in Sharon’s study (near a hanging wood goldfinch).

These fragile glass hangings appear to be stopped, mid-fall, in their descent to a shattering end. The thin thread that that suspends them makes visible the tugging force of gravity. The mobiles, spinners, and wind chimes not only defy gravity, they also give visibility and voice to the air.

Ours is a funhouse riot of beloved, wind-blown, gravity-defying delights. They are whimsical reminders to this wheezing bottom feeder of the astonishing funhouse we all inhabit, where our every moment is given life, heft, and in-formed by “invisibles.”

Jurassic Skies

November 13, 2019 / Brian Vandenberg

Birds. No terrestrial creature is more fantastical, more bizarre, more varied or more beautiful than birds. Birds, trees, gems, fish, coral, butterflies and flowers are the primary sources of color in our world. The list is short, and life on a planet without them would be drab and depressing. Color shocks and, not surprisingly, all of these galvanize a large following of enthusiasts. None are more passionate, or as legion, than birders.

Bird watchers are commonly noted for their fanaticism and often viewed, with some amusement, as oddballs. There is an obsessive, competitive, know-it-all subspecies of this flock that is notable on closer viewing of their collective habits. Most are gentle souls who delight in a “walk-in-the-woods.” What animates them all, at the deepest level, is wonder. Birding is a treasure hunt. A speck in the sky, an almost undetectable sound in the thicket, a camouflaged rustle in the reeds, a hole on a tree—or a cactus!—that flicks with movement, suddenly transformed to a bejeweled presence when sighted through the lens of a binocular’s magnification. From mundane to miraculous by merely lifting the glasses. What could be more thrilling?!

It is a measure of the numbing effects of routine and habit that we travel our days largely unaware or uninterested in these creatures in our midst. Language, one of our most precious attributes that joins us together, also anesthetizes. This was dramatically demonstrated to me on a summer visit to a new place, when, surrounded by the novelty of the unfamiliar, I heard a raucous, rowdy, insistent call of a bird. I was able to spy it through binoculars and was stunned by its exotic beauty. From behind, it shaded from an indigo blue at its head through azure, finally ending in almost aquamarine at the tip of its tail. The wing and tail feathers were ridged in black stripes, etched with contrasting splashes of white. A white chest and neck lead to a face with black stripes through the eyes that connected with a ring of black that circled from under the chin across the crown of the head. And, atop the head, a crest. I called to Sharon: “Come, quick, see this!” She did. She said: “It’s a blue jay.”

For that brief moment, I saw this remarkable being, free from the encumbrances of language, habit, and routine. It exposed the power of naming, which domesticates the world, providing us handles and footholds that allow a measure of perceived control, intimating understanding and thereby assuaging the anxiety, fright, and wonder of being in the world, naked, without a fig leaf.

I have had other disorienting encounters with birds. Rounding a curve in a path, I came face to face, eye to eye, with an owl. Two piercing yellow eyes that peered directly at me. Unlike most birds, its eyes are not on the side of its head, but fronted, like human eyes, in a direct, unnerving stare. Human-like consciousness was intimated in this locked-gaze encounter, but a disconcerting difference was signaled in their alien yellow color.¹

Then there was seeing a great blue heron in a marsh near the LA airport. This huge bird, 4 feet tall, taking flight, with its long neck leading to a pointed head with fierce war-like coloring and a crest, ending with a dagger-stabbing bill, majestically lifting off on a 6 foot wing span. Suddenly, I saw a dinosaur—a pterodactyl, in my midst. Dumbstruck, I realized that progeny of creatures from the Jurassic age fill our skies.

Birds are everywhere. Hiding in the bush, stealthy stalking in the glade, plunging into the lake, gliding in the updrafts, bobbing in the water, scurrying across the desert, skimming the water’s surface, dodging the in-and-out ocean wash, burrowing in the sand, hunting in the tundra, swooping and diving, darting from flower to flower, marching across ice flows, roosting in the tropical canopy.

They fill our world with their voices: mourning, crowing, peeping, chirping, quacking, squawking, drumming, hooting, whistling, warbling, cackling, cooing, screeching, “drink-your-tea”², and larking. Life-music signaling, saying, singing their urgent desires of warning, mating, and “calls of contact”.

Birds can be found day and night, in all seasons, in all locals. Their flight underscores that we are inelegant, lumbering bottom feeders. The wide universe of their shapes, colors, and strangeness are beyond what we are capable of dreaming; they are an alien presence alerting us to this uncanny world that is our home.

Birds “brain” us, club us into the miracle of this moment. They are just outside the window, beaconing…go forth and birdwatch, bird-listen—without words, naked.

What is Sacred?

May 10, 2019 / Brian Vandenberg

What is sacred? Some would point to the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Sutra, the Vedas. Some would say the sacred resides in their churches, their temples, their synagogues, their mosques. Some would say it is located in Mecca, in Bethlehem, in Jerusalem, in the Ganges, in Lumbini, in stupas, in the moon, in the sun. Clearly, what is sacred is based on the particular religion and its attendant teachings, practices, values, beliefs, and history.

Sacred and Mundane

Religion is the assumed frame for addressing the question, as scared is associated with the holy, which, in turn, is defined and understood within a religious context. The term “sacred” is derived from Latin, meaning “to set apart'” a partitioning of the sacred from the mundane. The set-apart of sacred from mundane in most religions involves the separation of “this world” from a transcendental, supernatural world. The transcendental world is before and beyond this world and the source and origin of the sacred.

This partitioning is established and maintained by cultural-religious practices, worship services, dress, ceremonies, rites, and rituals that serve to mark the boundaries of the sacred from the habits and customs of everyday life. They also offer a well-worn avenue, complete with signposts, guides, and guardrails, for entry into experiencing the scared.

These states, sacred and mundane, embody two different modes of being: One of awe, reverence, fear, and humility; of being in the presence of the unfathomable mystery and ineffable powers of god (or gods). The other, in contrast, of concerns and experiences of the quotidian and the commonplace. One extraordinary, the other ordinary. One transformative, the other commonplace.

This World Sacred

The set-apart, however, need not require a supernatural presence or origin. The sheer overwhelming presence of the world, the miracle that there is something rather than nothing, that it exists, that we exist, evokes the experience of the sacred. There is another world and it is in this world.¹ The sacred does not shine through this world from a source outside it—it is the world, itself, shinning.

This experience of the sacred shares much with the religious experience: It is not logical, not rational, not cognitive, but a state of being; of awe, reverence, fear, humility; of being in the presence of the unfathomable mystery and ineffable powers of the cosmos. The set-apart for this world sacred, however, is not found through established religious rites, rituals, and practices.

The experience of the mundane is the product of being socialized into a ready-made world of routines and habits, familiar meanings and cultural rituals, that render the world obvious, given, and straightforward. And it must be so, if we are to keep from being overwhelmed by the angst and terror of finding ourselves in a world that is beyond understanding; that beneath our feet, firmly planted in the habits and rituals of daily life, lies a yawning void. Experience of this world sacred, for those well secured to the “straightforward” world, requires breaking open the commonplace to glimpse the miraculous of this world that is papered over by the mundane.²

Experiencing This World

Whereas religion provides culturally established rituals and ready-made avenues for experiencing the sacred, no such sanctioned signposts or well-worn paths exist for experiencing this world sacred. The experience of this world sacred can come unbidden; surprising, shocking, disorienting, alarming, delighting, frightening us.

The encrustment of the mundane can also be punctured through science, which delivers head-spinning discoveries and mind-busting conclusions; our wildest dreams could not conger anything as bizarre, and contra the mundane, as quantum mechanics, black holes, or an infinite, expanding cosmos.³ Science teaches: The world is not only stranger that we imagine, it is stranger that we can imagine.⁴

Art, music, dance, poetry, theatre all, too, can shock us out of our mundane stupor. Seeing rather than looking; listening rather than hearing. A soup can, a splash of red, a face, a bird’s trill—anything, really—can be transformed to an experience of the sacred with the proper openness and reverence.⁵

Also, meditation— practicing to be present, alive to the experience of this moment without preconceptions—is another way to be present to the mystery, alert to the epiphany of the ordinary, alive to the holy and the numinous that is the world.

Some may object to this use of words “sacred”, “holy” and “numinous”, either because they fail to incorporate religious metaphysical referents, or because they reverberate with such connotations. But the power of these words does justice to the power of the experiences. No single religion owns these experiences. Indeed, their presence across religions underscores that they are fundamental human experiences resulting from our plight of finding ourselves alive within the Mystery of an unfathomable cosmos. And the challenge, for those of us for whom the sacred is This World, is to stand in the face of the Mystery, without explanation; astonished.

Happy New Year!

December 28, 2018 / Brian Vandenberg

“Opening Words” for Ethical Society Platform
December 31, 2017¹

Today is New Year’s Eve. Many will be going to parties where there will be much merriment, singing, countdowns, kissing (and more). Restraints are lifted; noisemakers, hats, costumes, games, and drinking to excess mark this joyous occasion. It is an affirmation of life, but just below the frantic fun lies the thorn of mortality:

“We have made it through another year”!!

“Will we make it through the next”??

New Year’s Eve parties are part of a larger calendar of life. New Year’s is a national holiday that formally marks a change in time; banks, schools, government, and businesses are closed; our calendar scrolls to the next year, marked by a new number, as we are synchronized to a communal rhythm regulating our individual lives. New Year’s marks an end, and a beginning, in the seasonal round of time. A time of pause to consider the passage of time, reflect on our lives and our place in the larger cosmic arc.

New Years is the oldest of human holidays, dating back to Egypt and Babylon, and the most universally celebrated world-wide. It is a celebration often associated with celestial events: winter solstice, moon and sun cycles, seasonal changes. Cosmological myths and stories of our human origins and fate are entwined with this celestial ordering of our lives. Our contemporary celebration of January 1^st is a legacy of the Roman calendar and cosmology; January named after Janus, a two-faced god, simultaneously looking backward and forward in time. While New Year’s has recently become secularized, it has long associations with both pagan and Christian celebrations.

It is most appropriate, then, that today Dr. Claude Bernard will discuss the scientific understanding of the cosmos and its role in our human origins. This is our Ethical Society origin “story”, and is why we have a prominent display of evolution in our gathering space downstairs. I use the word “story” metaphorically, as this story is derived from fact not fantasy.

I know many find this “story” unappealing cold, rational, and without appreciation of the transcendental mystery that pervades our lives. And this is mostly an accurate assessment of the scientific method. It is purposely impersonal, which is required to arrive at facts that are universal and not dependent on the perspective of any one observer. Understanding must be derived from a reasoned integration of the facts that anchor explanation in the material world. The understanding that results from this method, however, while not transcendental, is certainly not lacking in wonderment.

Our presence here today is bestowed by miraculous conception. We are stardust, composed of elements forged in cataclysmic cosmic conflagrations of unimaginable scope and power, hurling seeds of new forms, new worlds, into the void, across vast distances of space and time. The earth and all life found here, past and present, are the progeny of these seeds. And the dust that is us, configured into breathing, beating life for a cosmic eye-blink, derives its origins from the happenstance of millions of years of cumulative couplings, reaching back to the first wriggling’s of life on this planetary outpost.²

Almost as miraculous, we speak here today of these origins. Dust giving voice to its own beginnings; the cosmos, through our most frail, ephemeral being, bearing witness to itself. The facts, methods, and rational inquiry of science yields an origin “story”, rooted in the material world, more astonishing than any conjured through transcendental metaphysics. In Goethe’s words:

“The highest religious act is the shudder of awe before the visible universe”.

May you experience a shudder of awe at the wonderment of our cosmic origins.

Happy New Year!

Time Travel

October 5, 2018 / Brian Vandenberg

Time Machine

The dream of time machines, in their many forms, have usually aimed to take us back or forward in time—to slide along the trajectory of human existence, either to visit a long past event or leap to the future. We want to spy how it was, or how it will be, for us and our fellows. Our most urgent concerns are, naturally, with ourselves and this desire animates our quest to unbind the fetters of time. In this quest, we move along a “horizontal” temporal axis, maintaining our experience within a constant human “temporal envelop”.

Our “temporal envelop” is dictated by our biology: life span, adaptive functioning, and evolutionary niche. Our beating heart, breathing lungs, marching steps, habitual movements, and suite of neural and perceptual-motor reflexes are metronomes that establish our time signature.

What would await us if we traveled along the vertical axis? If we to spin the dial to the shortest intervals possible, then to the longest?

Shorter Intervals

Consider if we were to nudge the time dial to a slightly quicker ‘time zone’ within a different biological metronome: hummingbirds. The life span of hummingbirds is a short 3-5 years, but much intense life is packed into this brief time. The heart of hummingbirds’ pulse at 1000 beats per minute, wings snap at 50 beats per second, lungs breathing 250 times a minute, flying up-down-backward-forward-hovering all in an eye blink, yet migrating for 1000 mile journeys and, at night, entering a hibernating torpor.¹ The contrapuntal rhythms of hummingbird heart, wings and voice, the staccato, stabbing movements of flight and fight, and the allegro molto pace and multi measure rests makes for incomprehensibly complex jazz riffs.

Things get weirder still if we were to spin the dial toward the smallest time intervals. Events in this briefest of temporal neighborhoods occur in the domain of subatomic particles that inhabit near infinitesimal space and throb to very different beats than living organisms. The swarm of subatomic particles, governed by quantum mechanics, has been called a ‘particle zoo’ and the shortest enduring fundamental particle is the Z boson, which exists for a duration of about 10^-25 seconds.² A cloud chamber is one of the first methods used to capture the presence of subatomic particles, which leave vapor trails that allow for observing their fleetingly brief interactions ³.

Perhaps the most bizarre members of this ‘zoo’ are virtual particles, whose liminal existence is both substantive and unmeasurable. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle sets a time-energy/mass limit, or barrier, beyond which we cannot detect the particles themselves. But we know they exist by their effects on particles that endure on the detectable side of the barrier. The Uncertainty Principle, then, both establishes the lower limit of measurable time and also reveals that time, in the quantum zone, is tethered to mass/energy.

Longer Intervals

On the other hand, what if we nudge the time dial to a slightly longer interval, one attuned to a very different biological metronome: trees? Trees, whose upturned arms passionately reach toward the sky and whose roots tenaciously grasp the earth. Who have memory, send alarms to friends, offer aid to neighbors in crisis, nurse the young, nourish the aged and fallen, tell time, create and capture water, create and enrich their home/soil, wave welcome to birds, plants and critters of all kinds—all this we overlook, if not disbelieve, because our temporal beat allows us to see only a snapshot of the life and time of these living, breathing creatures ⁴.

The Big Bang occurred about 13.7 billion years or 10¹⁷seconds ago,⁵which marks the age of the universe and the longest time interval on our time dial. When we spin the dial toward this limit we lose our moorings. Time, itself, is revealed to be not a simple slide along a single dimension but a thread in a space-time fabric. Incomprehensibly large cosmic distances are measured in light years; the time it would take for light to travel from one point to another. So, the starlight we see convey the happenings that occurred long ago. This measurement of space via time hints at a more fundamental entanglement of the two. Time’s messages travel at a finite speed; the speed of light. Cosmic simultaneity does not exist—it is not the same time everywhere. This realization leads to a host of head-spinning conclusions: The basic coordinates for mapping events must be space-time coordinates. Clocks tic at different speeds, and lengths and distances shrink or expand—depending on the frame of reference. And, the space-time fabric itself is curved, twisted and, in some places, torn, where time-events fall into bottomless black holes. The contours of this fabric are determined by the mass of the matter in its vicinity; more mass, more distortions, and holes where stars have collapsed. Much of what seems bedrock-stable in our narrow time zone is an anomaly from a cosmic time perspective; Alice-in-Wonderland is the cosmic norm.

Time began with the Big Bang. Was there a ‘before’? The ‘before’ might well have been nothing, the void. However, the void— space with no energy, charge or matter— is not empty. It is pregnant with possibility; a churning, bubbling, boiling stew of virtual particles that flicker in-and-out of existence, ever so briefly. It is surmised that the Big Bang was a cataclysmic leap from possibility-to-actuality in this frothing quantum foam. Furthermore, our universe, and its Big Bang, may, perhaps, be a small region of a larger cosmos that has existed prior to this event. Our universe may be but a local time zone amidst an infinite space-time landscape.

Quick Decaying Particles

A being who exists near the largest cosmic space-time interval may likely have a similar perspective toward us as we have toward subatomic particles— our little, obscure, ephemeral neighborhood of space-time would be its particle zoo. Consciousness, which influences the actions of these tiny, scurrying, quick decaying particles—us— would be a kind of virtual particle in this physics, and our architecture, art, texts, broadcasts and space probes would be our vapor trails. The vertical traverse of time rockets us through dizzying loops, wrinkles, twists, spins, tumbles and holes. It does not offer visions of our human past or future. Rather, spinning this dial rips us from our comfortable temporal-spatial moorings, offering a wild ride through time itself and a kaleidoscopic glimpse of our place within the roiling cosmic order.

Water

May 17, 2018 / Brian Vandenberg

I swim for exercise several times a week, and undergo a species transformation. Vertical to horizontal, gravity-bound to weightless, a lumbering biped becomes an aquatic mammal. Immersed, massaged, chilled, my entire body tingles from the supporting surround of water. As I “crawl” along, head swinging from down to up, my vision turns from watery shimmer to sunlit solidity…and back. Embedded in this frolic in an alternative universe resides a thorn. Lose a breath, sense the remoteness of landed safety, gulp the aquatic environ, and a stab of fright reminds me that my shape-shifting self is not untethered. I must breathe. The water that supports can also kill. Whether in the pool, the page, or the mind, we can gain blessed respite from our fate, but we cannot be rescued. I swim, I sing this joyous panic.

weightless in the surge
jeweled creatures
snorkel dreams

“Why Me?!”

May 3, 2018 / Brian Vandenberg

“The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

This famous line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar wisely advises that we are not doomed by the heavens, but by ourselves. I would like to add a corollary—that how we regard the stars can doom or liberate us; that our lives are deeply affected by our cosmology.

Consider: “Why me?!”

This is an oft spoken lament when fate delivers a mishap, a crisis, a tragic blow. The emphasis of the query is on ME. “Of all the people in the world, why have I been singled out for this misfortune? What have I done to warrant such unfair treatment?!” The misfortune is experienced as a deeply personal violation of the natural order, of how things are supposed to unfold. We presume an implicit causal structure in this lament; that the universe is fair, that cosmic justice privileges us, and that we have been dealt a dirty deal.

How we understand the cosmic order gives rise to our experience of “Why me?”.

I would like to briefly explore the cosmic order as it applies to me; that is, myself as a unique, conscious being, present and alive at this moment. I begin with the basic causal question: What are the origins of “me”? How did I get here? Biologically, I am the product of my father’s sperm and my mother’s egg. But what are the circumstances of ‘me’; of my unique presence? This is a matter of probability. Of the millions of my father’s sperm, the singular one that impregnated my mother’s singular egg is “me’”. One in millions—that is the probability, or improbability, of “me”. But while this is the improbability of the biological event, it does not encompass the circumstances that gave rise to it. What if my father had been too tired or my mother too busy? What if a phone call or an emergency had interceded? Another untold million contingencies of intention, motivation, happenstance and caprice now magnify the biological improbability exponentially.

But this is only the first order improbability. What about my father’s parents? And my mother’s? And their parents. And then, again, their parent’s parents— and so forth. Indeed, this generational regress eventually traces the lineage of the human race. And, further back still, as the genome of our human ancestors emerges from earlier primates, and these, in turn, harken to earlier unions of more distant life forms. Each coupling, and the circumstances surrounding it, stacking more orders of improbability on improbability, receding into the mists of the first primordial awakenings of life.

This, however, is not the end of the causal thread. Life emerged only because of a host of remarkable planetary developments— the appearance of water and of oxygen among the most notable. And these, in turn, are descendants of big-bang cosmic events that created this precious globe and its sweet-spot orbit around our life-giving star. My being here, now, is a point on a singular trace among the near infinite number of possible trajectories that could have spun out after the big bang.

From cosmic beginnings to the formation of our planetary outpost, from water to life, from slime mold to ape, and from my father’s sperm to my mother’s egg, one single moment askew in this house-of-cards tower of improbability stretching to the stars… then—no “me’”.

The singularity that is me also embodies the entire arc of creation: In my star-dust body, animated by the elixirs of water and oxygen, my heart throbs and my breath heaves to the rhythms conferred to me by my evolutionary heritage.

This cosmic order brings me to my knees in gratitude— and in astonishment, I ask:

“Why me?!”

Statues in the Park

Billy Collins ¹

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider died in battle.

if only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—

bronze hoofs affixed to a stone base—
it meant the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theatre across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone beds,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
the murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-grey block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.