Waiting at the stop light, in the starlight, watching the universe pass by.

When I think of the sun as simply what it is…a star, it helps me to keep existence in perspective…in a different “light”…in this season of lights.

Recently as I was coming back from my swim at the local Rec Center I was waiting for the light to turn green so I could move my fossil-fuel powered mass forward.

When it did, I moved 25 mph on top of the face of the planet’s 1000 mph rotation, and its revolution around our star at 67,000 mph, and our star system’s journey through the our galaxy at 514, 000 mph, and the galaxy’s 1.3 million mph trek across our universe.

Whew!

In all this rush I saw before me, crossing the street, a human carrying groceries from a church, another, on the sidewalk, with a four-legged creature at the end of a tether.

I came upon my tribe’s ensign flapping in the starlight. The symbol  currently designates a section of tectonic plate rupture of the supercontinent, or Pangea, some 175 million years ago. I exited my steel cube and recorded the ensign on a sensor.

Last week an article in the local wood-pulp-press spoke of the discovery of a black hole, the most distant ever, more than 13 billion light years away. It was very near the beginning of our “Big Bang”…some 13.8 billion years ago.

Illustration by NYNewsday

But I think maybe our Bang is just one Big Bang among countless other Bangs in the exoverse.

Conceive of our Bang and its resultant universe, a spacial spheroid. Consider it in the deepest corner of an abstract Grand Canyon. How many of these bulbs or bangs would fit in that “canyon”?

Astronomical.

And why just one Grand Canyon full of Big Bangs?

Now, the temperature at the start of our Big Bang was about ten billion degrees.

Conceive of life ever evolving from that super inferno. Impossible, yes? But it did.

Conceive of love ever to be born of that inferno. Impossible, yes? But it did.

I measure all of my personal situations against this. Also my tribe’s, my planet’s.

Earth’s fires, floods, earthquakes, test-rocket meteor showers over distant seas, starvation in sub-Saharan Africa, bloated wealth among the planet’s few, gaseous planetary heating.

Our tiny bauble, a fragile orb with only an onionskin atmosphere protecting it, in limitless space.

Since that Pangea ruptured into many parts that today are individual continents and nations, so did later humankind’s beliefs, faiths, religions split apart and drift across this blue planet. Today some estimates are as high as 4,200 religions around our home, Earth. Each with their own “as-it-is-writtens.”

And on this spec-bauble is my home, Long Beach NY, the City by the Sea. Our tiny town of 36,000 could be likened to a quantum particle in ineffable exist-ence.

So here I am in my little town and you in yours, in the enclosed comfort of our kitchens, our living rooms, each a spacial sphere of their own, having a cuppa, or a glassa, sharing news of family, school, work.

Maybe you live in a big city of concrete, steel and glass that speaks…

…where ice skates glide beneath laughter that shrieks.

And maybe flakes of white pass by the panes, firesides crackle, fir scents mix with nogs and chestnuts…if you’re very lucky.

But even if your personal sphere is less “Currier and Ives”, maybe just look into the eyes of your children, into the eyes of your spouses. Are these orbs not also celestial spheres? Do we not see love within, do we not feel the gravity of family attraction? Perhaps we all have our personal…”theory of relativity?”

Brothers and Sisters of the original fire, maybe it’s time to lay aside our flags, swords, and most importantly…our certainties.

Whatever brand of faith we 4,200 are, consider that fire from which we all were born, consider the journey we all have taken. Consider lighting a candle…together…in the starlight.

On a strip of sand deep in the corner our our canyon…a celestial candle burns

Be well,

Leebythesea, stopping at the red light, under the starlight, watching the universe pass by.