Big Windows

                      INVOCATION

O little life little life with such big windows
sometimes I look out      or something
                                                   looks in

nowhere to hide from seeing      being seen

O battered heart battered heart
                                             break open
don't be afraid     let the tiny buds blossom
let their roots be nourished by your blood

walking in and out of buildings is too easy
but when do we pass freely
                                 in and out of worlds

O hidden face hidden face of all sorrows
by the clean light of morning
         smile at me       kiss me on the eyes

                             *

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner--what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

           with the winds of homecoming.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke --

  O LITTLE LIFE WITH SUCH BIG WINDOWS

     In a span hardly longer than my own handful of lived decades, the human perspective on our place in the cosmos has exploded to encompass the infinite! Now our vision can leap billions of light years out into space, meanwhile traveling correspondingly far, far back into time. When viewed through the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, what looks like a swarm of phosphorescent gnats--turns out to be a swarm of primordial galaxies! Talk about our little, little life! Talk about such Big Windows!

     Even further, we've learned that this titanic extravaganza, born from The Big Bang, is rushing outward faster and faster--apparently forever! Also that it, and therefore we, are made up of something called Dark Matter, and something else called Dark Energy, which together comprise nearly 95 percent of the entire universe! Scientists call these unknowns "dark" not just because they can't see or in any other way directly detect them; but also because the most brilliant minds simply cannot even understand what they actually are.

     From a Renaissance paradigm only a few hundred years ago which celebrated "man" (at least in the West) as "the measure of all things" and reckoned his concerns the unchallenged center of creation, we've journeyed to an all too pervasive postmodern conviction that human existence is essentially meaningless; and an all too dispiriting awareness that our own unstable planet is merely an alarmingly over-populated yet infinitesimally tiny speck adrift in a violent and chaotic immensity.

     But there's another voyage of consciousness we've undertaken at the same time--one just as incredible, unprecedented and mind-boggling: a fateful plunge into the roiling, uncharted depths of the individual psyche. To counterbalance the supreme importance of the Hubble Space Telescope, we also need to recognize the incalculable significance of the Freudian-Jungian Soul Microscope!

     Through these two marvels, we've not only expanded our awareness outward to confront the infinite; we've simultaneously contracted it inward until we quiver, naked as newborns, poised on the threshold of the eternal.

     There's no longer any way to become authentically awake and fully alive, struggling through these tumultuous, overwhelming first years of the Third Millennium, without embracing this profound paradox. I realize I can only rediscover my true essence, only re-invent my primal self, while skewered on the fiery crosshairs of both a material macrocosm and a spiritual microcosm.

     Here alone I balance precariously yet serenely at that crucial pivot point where the stupendous universe expanding forever outside me, converges to meet the stupendous universe unfurling forever within me. We've even conjured a name for this transcendent state of being--Cosmic Consciousness.

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