Pup Creek Falls, Mt. Hood National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Matter, energy, space and time: the entirety of physical existence. Einstein unravelled their truth: they are all entwined, a four dimensional yin-yang, the image of gravity. But, what gave him pause that he could never fully overcome was the yin-yang of existence and nonexistence: quantum reality. And that is what we live within and are: matter, energy, space and time, existence and nonexistence, flickering on and off in rhythms seen and unseen, known and unknown, felt and unfelt. And consciousness, like gravity, is manifest through that dazzle while itself untouchable — a void — infused deep within us, the motivating core, the suns of our solar systems of individual being: life.
I step outside my warm bubble of house-air into the cool fresh oceanic night, which sucks my awareness out to the farthest reaches of its fathomless inky blue-black vacuum, punctuated by pinpricks of light beyond the frontiers of experience, whose inverted depths are a dark crystalline silence, the infinitely dissolved horizon past the tenuous haze of our shared breaths with green life lush with the fragrance of August flowers eddying through the living tangle of Earth’s surface in my forested canyon laden with ancient expirations cooled and moistened to sparkling renewal.
This velvety opaque transparency pulses with drones by crickets and unfolds unseeable vistas of distant sound whose tides are brought near, washing resonantly through me and absorbing me into the totality of this timeless sequence of unthinking scintillating instants, pinpricks of existence flashing out of an eternal sea of nonexistence like glints of moonlight on ripples of a four-dimensional ocean, the unbounded immersion.
I breathe in my share of this pregnant unconscious and sense the capture of two or three molecules released millennia ago in the funeral pyre of that great poet’s expended form, its brief journey of genetic transport finished as mine will soon enough be, and I embed that molecular poetry into my blood and sinews until its time for release comes with my organic disintegration into pure fleeting memory. Coyotes howl with bell-like clarity through the dark effulgence, and my moments of eternity come to rest for this night. So, I turn into my house-bubble for sleep.
Dawn fog in the canyon: I am looking at the sun just rise over the crest of the ridge, and light pour through the fog into the canyon, making it glow as it flows up the stream-bed and through the trees along the hillsides, with blue sky above, and birds darting through the panorama framed by my vision, the warmth of the rays descending into my body as I face before it, immersed in a cloud of light, evaporating. A bird chirps. Mist rises. The ground of the forest lights up. Leaves emerge glistening green from their silhouettes. The voices of the forest call to each other, silence fades into the light of day. Rebirth. I am who am once again.
