Yearn to be small

“It is very strange that the years teach us patience –
that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.”
Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles)

(full moon / 2018 / Julie Cook)

Sorrowful at dusk, I wandered outside to mindlessly water the plants.
The sun had set and the moon was rising in the evening sky.

There was a quiet to this little world of mine.

A stark contrast to those teeming cities across this reeling nation caught in turmoil.

It was not yet night but rater twilight…and the rising moon caught my eye…

It wasn’t yet a full moon, but the light cast was illuminated through a humid and hazy sky–
casting an ethereal thin glowing shimmer…all veiled through a typical southern night sky.

I looked up, and despite not yet being a full moon, I suddenly felt very small.

Overwhelmed by a seemingly small glowing skewed orb in a steamy southern night’s sky,
oddly, I found a peace in the sense of being small.

I suddenly yearned to be small…
I relished in feeling minute.

For to be small meant that I was not the center of this, or better yet,
I was not, am not, the proverbial center of the universe or even my universe.

And maybe that is really my hope…my hope, my wish, my prayer…
that my fellow countrymen would and could see that they too should yearn to be small.

That the terrorists, the rioters, the looters, the arsonists, the criminals could see
that they are not as big as they imagine nor as grand as their egos dictate.

And so I say to one and all, yearn to be small.

Egos, our egos, are not small.
They vie for power and control.
They vie to be front and center.

An ego is much like a black hole in that it gobbles up everything in its path.
It feeds upon everything and everyone that happens within its sights.

Death, the loss of life, the destruction of property are all of little consequence–
as the ego fails to acknowledge the reality.

The ego lies.
Satan lies.
He is the father of all lies.

The ego is too self-absorbed to see anything other than itself or of its wants and needs.
The ego yearns to be fed.
It must be fed in order to survive and thrive.

Our lives are being consumed by egos.
Ravenous egos.
And they don’t care who stands in the way.

We can either succumb to the lies of an ego, or we can be bold while
daring to be small.

May we yearn, nay dare, to be small.

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God;
believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms.
If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
And if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come again and will take you to myself,
that where I am you may be also. 4 And you know the way to where I am going.
John 14:1-4

concentric centers

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
Thomas Merton

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei

(images of an amazing sunflower / Julie Cook / 2015)

concentric
kənˈsentrik
adjective: of or denoting circles, arcs, or other shapes that share the same center, the larger often completely surrounding the smaller. Late Middle English: from Old French concentrique or medieval Latin concentric us, from con- ‘together’ + centrum ‘center.’

The sun sits in the middle of a solar system which sits in the middle of a galaxy. . .
While everything and everyone spins mindlessly around the center—that being the sun.
God. . .who sits at the center of the universe
God. . .who was before there was anything
God. . .by whose hand all things came in to being
God. . .who will be when all has come and gone
God. . .in whose breath we find life
God. . .who all living beings revolve around
God. . .who sits at the center of our very being
God. . .who sits at the center of it all. . .
Or
do you believe that this is all here merely by happenstance?
do you believe it all just fell in to place?
do you believe that you sit at the center of it all,
wielding your own power of what will or won’t be?
You who builds skyscrapers, roadways, planes and rockets?
You who charts the heavens, the seas, the entire planet?
You who makes medicine, who attempts to heal, to teach, to save?
You who makes guns, bombs, wars and takes lives.
You who kills, steals, rapes, murders, lies, cheats. . .
You who abuses drugs, alcohol, sex, money, people, animals

Who created the flower?
Did it just happen one day?
Did it evolve from something else?
How did it come to be perfectly and concentrically formed, fitting amazingly together petal by petal and seed by seed?
How does it “know” to follow the sun for its life giving rays?
Can you, did you, make this flower?
You can make a copy, “print” a 3D image, paint or draw a copy, take a picture but can you make, create, produce a flower?
The question remains. . .
Who sits at the center?
At the center of it all. . .
Is it man?
or
Is it God?

It all comes from the center of One

“The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.”
― Anaximander

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
Empedocles

(close up images of snowball crepe myrtles / Julie Cook / 2014)

Two ancient Greek philosophers whose lives overlapped eons ago.
Both curious men.
Curious as to man’s existence and of his relationship to his planet—and of that planet’s relationship to the sky, the moon, the stars and the sun–the known universe of the day.
There had to be a center to it all did it not?
A single place of origin.
A single place in which it, as in everything, had all emerged.
Doesn’t it make sense that everything comes from a center?
As in spreading outward from a single point—just as the ripples on the water when a stone is dropped into a pond–reverberations of energy moving outward from the original point or source of the expanding energy.
Yet the true answer seemed to elude each of them.
Each statement, each observation, remaining somewhat open-ended as in not conclusive, merely observant—as if they each knew there was indeed more to the observation.

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Colossians 1:17