FOURTEEN: Connecting

The night sky makes a good metaphor for what we call “reality.” It’s a sign of our times that inside the city, you can hardly see the stars any more, but if you go to the country, the vision of the universe is still magnificent, millions of stars and galaxies dancing against a velvet backdrop.

But what are we seeing, exactly when we look up at the stars? Not an array of light that exists in anything like the present. What we are seeing is the coincidental arrival upon earth and our retinas light from all different times of the distant past, mostly millions of years old. How those stars are actually configured now in relation to each other, we don’t have a clue. No matter if we use an optical telescope or the most advanced radio telescope on Hubble, we are viewing ancient phenomena, each event coming from widely different time periods. Half those stars could have collided in some kind of cosmic catastrophe millions of year ago, and we wouldn’t know it for another period of millions of years, which is to say never.

The relationship to what we are seeing in the sky has no relationship whatsoever to what is happening with those objects of our vision in the present.

I wonder how this metaphor translates to our lives on the ground. What comes to mind is our relationships to each other. I look into your eyes: how far away are you? What epoch of the past are you living in? How many light years are there between us? This is a lonely thought. I sometimes feel: “I’m on my own here.”

In a sense, the opposite is true. In the relationships between us as human beings, there is no separation. We are born with a physical, real time connection to our mothers, through the umbilical cord. And though the cord is cut soon after, we remain skin to skin close to our mothers for a long time.

When my son Slater was born, his mother needed to sleep, so the wise nurse gave him to me and had him sleep skin to skin against my chest for the first six hours of his life on earth. When he became a toddler, he would repeat this post birth scenario every morning. I would be working at my computer when he awoke, and he would crawl onto my lap and sleep or cuddle there for a solid half hour. He kept it up for a good 4 or 5 years. He’s 12 now, and light years have come between us, but we still have that primal connection.

Looking at the stars, we can trace their light back in time to 13.7 billion years ago (whatever that means) to before the alleged big bang, when our universe was infinitesimally small and composed of just one clump of whatever, infinitely connected.

Maybe death is like a reverse big bang for us, where we get to feel connected with each other again. Where ever it is we go, it seems obvious to me that we go to the same place, even if that place is nowhere. How much consciousness we get to bring with us is another question: we just don’t know. But it’s comforting to think that no matter how disconnected we get with each other during our life times, we will all connect again in the end.