I stood outside tonight and gazed up at a full brilliant moon laid carefully against the night sky, and a pure, unfettered realization of everything struck me. We as humans live our lives, and for whatever reason – perhaps sheer practicality – our thoughts dwell only on the immediate. Only those things that have any direct bearing in our lives are taken into account; the “unnecessary” is often discarded in an attempt to streamline reality. But this night I looked up at that glowing ball of rock and I thought of almost everything.
The tiniest particle of dust on the surface of the moon… the most horrible fish that lurks beneath the deepest waters… the brother and sister playing poker in a lakeside cabin… the reader reading this… the hopes of those who have been and the memories of those to come… So very many things, here and there, then and now, real and unreal, which constitute our world.
And the air was crisp tonight.
Strange how a shining orb in the sky can take a mind so many places; and yet that luminescent disc is a tremendous mass of stone held in place by the invisible Hands of God. The grass beneath my feet struggles to push its way forth out of this enormous planet spinning its way around an enormous star in an even more enormous universe. And here I stand, a tiny man made up of infinitely smaller particles and infinitely larger dreams. Within this three and a half pound head full of gray matter is an unfathomable imagination and an eternity of lives lived by those who do not exist.
The seconds count off on the clock while the years – lifetimes – count off in my mind. Voices of the past repeat themselves in the silence of the city, desires of the soul press the heart into breaking, and tears in my eyes flow for things I have not done and may never do. If I could only disappear and become all things; to experience the world not as a participant but as a whole. The grief, the joy, the death, the life, the pain, the pleasure all mingled together to create a sense of completion.
“That sleep of death” is only a part; to experience only that would be to miss the entirety of this life. Yet to only partake of life is to never enter that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” There is no fear in these; they are but a small part of a larger picture, and to capture the entire image is to understand the beauty and the skill of its Creator.
But for now I must sit and listen. A cricket’s song contributes to the midnight air as do my thoughts the midnight hour. I am just a man, wracked with limitation; these are just ideas, take them as you will.
