a tiny blue stone

At work the other day Jackie and I were talking about these blogs, how they are a great chance for people to express themselves, and how this whole internet thing is really like another life that people can live though, a job, a relationship, a religion, a conversation…
On this blog I usually write spiritual insights and philosophy—conversations I would normally have with some of my friends back home. But really, most people who read this blog probably don’t really want to hear about that kind of stuff. They want to know about what I ate today, and who I talked to, and what my boss looks like and what my office looks like—the more personal day-to-day stuff.

But I usually don’t write about that stuff in my real journal (even if I should). So it is tough to write about it here. But I took some pics. Here is my office at City Hall (I go there when I don’t have school). Reading Ender’s Shadow right now, loving it. You can also see my cell phone and ipod on the desk. (And how the hell do cell phones work? How does it get to the satellites so quickly, and then why don’t I hear all sorts of other conversations? If it is a wave, why isn’t it disrupted by other waves? How do phone numbers work? Questions..) Here is Jackie, my co-Jet. Here are some students who were watching me drink coffee in the teacher’s room. Pics of Dave and Mayu when we visited a nearby waterfall. More stones I found at the river. Every stone is different. And there were millions of them, reaching all the way out to the sea, and all the way back to the mountains. And now, let us take that image into a more typical style of journal entry:


A god’s eye view

Imagine you are the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, and you look inside yourself and you see a tiny, beautiful blue stone glowing next to a yellow star. When you examine the blue stone you see all sorts of beings living on its surface. You see storms and clouds and waves crash. You see wars bloom like flowers and die like flowers. You see fires burn out and the smoke dissolve into the air and the ashes into the ground. And you are there to watch it all happen, watch all the beings crawl and cry and grow and love and laugh and kill and cry some more, and you do the same, feel the same feelings that ripple across the surface of the stone. And you look at this tiny stone in your body with infinite compassion, infinite love, infinite acceptance, infinite forgiveness, because you know that all of it is in you, and you are in all of it.

If you stand back far enough, you can see this earth as a beautiful blue stone covered in flowers, blooming and dieing. Hold that stone like a precious jewel found nowhere else in existence, and have compassion for it, for what else can you do, really? Slowly place the jewel inside your heart and see how it generates a love without end.

When I emerge from a fantasy like that one, I really feel a new urge to embrace this world with all my heart. To appreciate all of it, even the pain. To let my heart beat and break. Let it break, because this is the only chance I might have to even have a heart. The fantasy actually changes the quality of my life. It reminded me (re-minded me) I must use this time I have here, this precious, limited time I get to witness this incredible play of forces and forms and feelings, to help others, to love others, to help others see just how beautiful they are, because they are so beautiful.

“This is the impossibility of the existence of anything!” Indeed, indeed. Kerouac expounds what I often forget. And what I feel explode inside me whenever I remember that is an incredible sense of excitement. This is it! WOW! And, not only am I alive, holy god, but I am alive with others just like me--others that feel and fear and dream and die—others that want to be happy and don’t want to suffer.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Is a great question to never stop asking, even if it might never be answered, because within it can be the idea that there might not have been anything at all? There could have been none of this stuff, so all of it is a gift. The Multiplicity, the variations, the infinite diversity—no two leafs are the same, no two rocks, no two insects, no two people. Atoms might all be the same. I don’t know. I can’t see them (I don’t even know what the hell they are! Clouds of probability?). There could be a single energy running beneath all these multiple forms. Makes sense. But, forgetting that "unifying essence," just looking at all the diversity is enough to conclude that this is a universe of infinite creativity, a truly magnificent design, even if it is just a hologram, an illusion. Even if it is a dream, it is a glowing, luminous dream, full of feelings and beings and depth and diversity. It is infinitely deep, infinitely diverse, and so infinitely divine, and infinitely here. Behind it all may be the Great Unformed Abyss, the same Nothingness that was there in the beginning, in the beginningless beginning and as it was in the beginning forever shall be, world without end, amen, but it doesn’t matter in the least, not when I am looking at the stones along the riverbed, each one a different color, a different shape. And when I look up at the clouds. And at the mountains. And at all the people, and I can see diversity, and therefore, I can see infinity.