The big trip



There are one billion trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the observable universe.  Our sun is just ONE of those stars.

You see?

There is a bigger space out there. A WAY bigger space.

Most days, the likes of us, go about the business right in front of our noses. That is what people do.

We can only see so much. We believe we are limited to that which is around us, in this physical world. We have our lives, and from where we stand, with our two little feet, in the midst of our day, we see our narrow alley. Our little acre. Our own backyard. We are rooted deeply in these constructs.

But. More is there.

A lot of us have seen or felt glimpses of the infinity. That’s what we are really in the midst of. Infinity. We live in — an ALL existence. At times, we’ve been given a sense of something else. The breathtaking vista at the top of a cliff, a quiet moment in church, the very last breath when a loved one dies, a fuzzy caterpillar, a candle lit in silence. It may run through us like a shiver, or take our breath from us. It could raise the hairs on our necks, or make our stomachs flip. But those incidents are few. Mostly because the rest of the time, we simply are not aware. We can’t see what we won’t.

Some call it the divine. And it makes no matter what kind of name we put on this. It is right with us, and we with it. This place is not limited to the constructs of either space or time.

We try to make sense of what is happening in our lives. We make best-laid plans, which are often overturned. We trip. We may even fall. Or be confused or hurt. Many times we find great happiness, when things are going the way we want them to go. We try to figure this. Or that. We breathe.

I can only say that our place is here. No matter where that “here” might be. Because in each one of us IS the infinity. It is the divinity. It is the thing that is capable of going beyond our own backyard.

Even though we take our places in this earthly space, this temporal realm — there is a place within is us — a part of us, which remains completely free of the confines we face here. Our innermost. Our outer realms.

And the moments when we get these glimpses, these brushes, with the divine, are our windows to our profound and wonderful place in all of existence.

NASA just launched a probe that will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun’s surface. It won’t get there until 2024, at the speed of 430,000 miles per hour.

Compared to the rest of it, this is less than a blink, a drip, a dot.
And here we are. And here we are.

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“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

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“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me”
― Gustave Flaubert

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