Asking the Question Today we ask what love is. Given how many people have tried to analyze the sensation, action, and essence of love, I suspect this attempt will leave us with more questions than answers, but we humans have always asked unanswerable questions. Why stop now? So what is love? There’s the welling up of tenderness in a mother’s chest when she gazes upon her child, the sensation of hormones that surge through a lover’s bloodstream, the unconditional regard of friends for one another, the reverent respect of student for teacher. But there’s also the adoring gaze of a hound for its human companion, the geese who spend their…
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Poetry, Gardening, and “the Pulsing in the Universe”
The Pulsing in the Universe The poet Stanley Kunitz said that if one listens in the night, beneath the rumble of traffic and wind and animals, one can hear the “pulsing in the universe.” [1] What is this pulsing? Is it something more true than what we perceive during the bustle of our day? What can it tell us? How do we learn to hear it? Why should we bother? Along with being a poet, Kunitz was a gardener. For nearly all of his one hundred years on Earth, he touched and tended and shaped and loved the soil and the plants that grew there. Along with tending gardens, he…
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The Light of Enlightenment
An Experience of Enlightenment Years ago, as I was listening to my spiritual director talk about the universe, I suddenly saw the universe inside her heart. Like Wordsworth, who saw the world in a grain of sand, I saw the universe as the size of a fist. In that moment, I understood that time and space don’t really exist, that the universe is immensely vast, but incredibly small at the same time. If we could comprehend this and learn to work with the energies that existed, we could cross to where star number 090423 exploded. In 2009, the light from this star reached the space-based Swift satellite. Using redshift analysis,…