We are miniscule points of miniscule points existing in a mind so large the galaxies are mere neurons, and the event horizon of black holes defines the boundary of a single synapse. Drill down through all the galaxies, drill down through all the stars. Sort down through all the planets to this one, sort through all the life forms, sort through every human being who ever was and ever will be – and here we are.

We are the most improbable of the improbable. We began as atoms in the great expansion at the beginning of the universe, coagulants of stardust seared in quantum shock waves, cooked in boiling bowls of granite; proto-proteins churned and pressed and fired by heat and pressure and lightning, hurled into oceanic depths until the genesis of the thing which rules us washed ashore, the thing as ruthless as the universe which made it: Life.

It is an engine plowing down the track of time, accreting layers around the first vivified amalgam of stardust which held it, until here we are, sentient tools of its stoic imperative. We are elaborations of stardust, instruments who serve a master which leaves only our death in its wake.

We serve as scout, calculator, navigator, and inventor. We explore the ground, devise paths, chart journeys. We create gods and wonders and illusions and dreams and build libraries and churches and citadels to house and sustain them all. We learn: fire warms, the wheel reduces toil, seeds grow, water sustains, sunlight illuminates and darkness obscures. We are instruments, in service and servitude to life itself.

If we should lose our feet and legs and hands and arms, if a curtain of blood drowns our brain and we are no more – cortex obliterated and consciousness smothered and only a lump remains – still we are ruled by the goading enforcers embedded deep in flesh and bone; still we are ruled by the stubborn muscular matrix in the deep mind where our master demands: Breathe lungs, beat heart! Live! The sum of all things derives from this source.

There is no thing greater than the sum of its parts; the sum of anything is the thing itself, quantified in a complex formula which contains legions of factors and myriads of variability.

Water in a container takes the form of the container, and when we pour the water out it is still water. The water when contained is not a gestalt product of the sum of the two conditions. Water in a container is not a greater thing; it is simply the product of the sum itself.

It is not so with consciousness. We are pleased to think that consciousness is separate from its container, and when the body is removed consciousness will, like water, return to its essential form. This is not so. Consciousness is the body and is not separate from it. When the body dies, consciousness dies with it, and in that moment the complex sum of an entire, singular universe blinks out.

What is real and what is not real? Is reality defined only by that which remains when consciousness is absent? When the conscious beholder of sky and stars, mountains and rivers, and light and darkness is removed and only the elemental energies and resultant forms remain, is that what is real?

If reality is defined by what remains outside of consciousness and yet both are real, our dualistic perspective of this fact implies the existence of an absolute reality, and also a relative reality, a subset of its source. Thus the creations of consciousness become real to consciousness itself.

This is an unnecessary fallacy. We do not have to think in order to be; we are. We are a complex sum of the universe, servants to a simple mandate. We are painfully finite, exquisite elaborations of stardust, conscious for a moment on the timeline of the universe and then gone. Yet we are real. Our every thought, feeling, dream and creation is real, because when all is summed, and every factor and variability accounted for the answer is, simply: One.

It is all one thing.

So keep this in mind, my reader: The action is not in the answer, it is there in the things summed. It is in that momentary universe you create and live. It is in the reality you are. It is in the structure you build and populate with love and faith and hope and speculation and imagination and yes, even every delusion you make real.

————
The Hands of the Carpenter

We lived in cave and cliff and longhouse and igloo and skin tent
We lived in forest and on plain and mountain
In ice and desert, on water and land

Now we live in lumber and steel and glass and concrete
Far from the forest, far from the sand
Far from the earth where we began

Yet down through time and across all ages
Something binds us all together,
All our bodies and arms and hands

Arms gather the beloved to our body
Hands hold and shape the caress
Of all we love

Yes, hands make weapons
Arms push away
The body has desires which corrupt in the absence of love

We die.

Yet
Love…

Yes.
Love lives.
Love carries us on.

————
Two Songs and an Epilogue for Every True Love

1. The Song of One: Quasimodo

Grief breaks the backbone, bends it double
It scuttles streets beneath eyes repulsed
In revulsion at its burden

It bears a bag of meat slung over its shoulder
Carrying every curse inflamed in flesh
Remembering the kind eye, the cooling caress

Dead now
Safe from all covetous priests and cozened congregations
In the dark crypt death consumes their consummation

The sum of all good and evil is known
The balance point between poles is posted
The farthest reach of dark and light revealed.

The entwined bones tumble to dust
Swirl in a soft whirl of wind
Rise to the stars

2. The Song of Two

One day I praised her and she demurred
Standing in the center of her brilliant beam
And I, and eye, knew, and

Eye and I replied
“In all the worlds, in all of time
There has to be One who is highest

Best, most beautiful
Brightest
Why would you think it is not you?”

Eyes rode out to eyes then
rode back again
Each saw the other of the One beyond the end

Beyond all thoughts of aughts and noughts we knew
We knew
We knew

It was true.

Epilogue

The entwined bones tumble to dust
Swirl in a soft whirl of wind
Rise to the stars

It was true.