While engaged my wife and I penned this goal for our marriage and family: “May we never lose our wonder”. Your Dad was such a gift to you!
Your ability to capture the fascinating and even the incomprehensible in such poetic and moving language is a work of art, and resonates with me deeply. I am looking forward to sharing your work with my 8 year old son.
Wonder is the only reasonable response to such a love note and labor of love, stretching infinitely in its intricacy and complexity, whether gazing jaw dropped and into a telescope or gobsmacked into a microscope. If you were the best father ever, you could never in a million years design such a environment for experiential learning and joy in which to raise your son or your daughter, yet here the earth is, waiting out our back door, if we’re only undistracted enough with ourselves to see it.
I have experienced that we have a good Father, and that such loving benevolence is not chance, but evidence of greatness. It is an invitation.
True Christianity isn’t so much how it is commonly portrayed (and regrettably, practiced), as an emphasis in right behavior to achieve a social credit score sufficient to look down their nose at others in hypocrisy while still, at the core, being just as self centered as anybody else, with the plan of eventually exiting this place so that they can look down their nose from a VIP club in eternity.
It is seeing past the Vegas we ourselves have created of this world, and into the invitation of the wild, the unknown, and the sacred, enough to realize that there was a plan for all of this, and a goal.
You. You were the goal.
And you are not a cosmic orphan, or a cell, or an organism, you are a *son*.
And if his word is true, when you seek your heavenly father, “you will find him, when you seek him with all of your heart.” Which is another way to say, ‘allow yourself to stare in openness and wonder’, which you are doing.
With your heart heading of unselfishness and your obvious openness to wonder, I do think that if you ask him to personally reveal himself to you, you will find yourself further gobsmacked at the result, and also find that in your microscope and telescope that have grown to know a lot about him already!
Thanks Mark - enjoyed this one. I was brought up on Lyall Watson books courtesy of my mother and he was pretty big on the importance of keeping well Earthed even while stretching the imagination:)
A very good one , Mark. Thanks for the logarithmic trip from electron to light-year. Interesting that we live in the middle of that, but there's a lot of mystery beyond the light-year. What structures exist halfway between the light-year and 14.8 billion light-years? Likely, we cannot fully know or understand. But we continue to imagine.
That's "only" another 10 orders of magnitude on top of the 31 :-).
Some more thought experiments...
It is 11 orders of magnitude from a proton to the width of a human hair, the smallest size we can see.
It is 11 orders of magnitude from the width of a human hair to the diameter of our planet.
Skip 2 orders of magnitude to get up to the size of the Sun.
It is 12 orders of magnitude from the diameter of the Sun to the diameter of our galaxy (100,000 light years).
It is a bit over 5 orders of magnitude from the diameter of our galaxy to the diameter of the known universe.
The total spans 41 orders of magnitude from proton to universe, and the true halfway point is still well within our ability to comprehend: ~350,000m or about the distance to Seattle.
Outside these limits lie quarks, which are assumed to have zero size (but if they have size are at least 10,000 times smaller than a proton) and anything beyond the visible universe, which could also be quite substantial :-).
Thank you once again Mark. I appreciate your perspective and love of your Earth embodied experience. I too choose Life here awakening the exquisite sensing capacity within deep embodiment….🌎
I love your writing for the accessibility of big ideas and wonder for an old cynic and his young son.
I second the above!
While engaged my wife and I penned this goal for our marriage and family: “May we never lose our wonder”. Your Dad was such a gift to you!
Your ability to capture the fascinating and even the incomprehensible in such poetic and moving language is a work of art, and resonates with me deeply. I am looking forward to sharing your work with my 8 year old son.
Wonder is the only reasonable response to such a love note and labor of love, stretching infinitely in its intricacy and complexity, whether gazing jaw dropped and into a telescope or gobsmacked into a microscope. If you were the best father ever, you could never in a million years design such a environment for experiential learning and joy in which to raise your son or your daughter, yet here the earth is, waiting out our back door, if we’re only undistracted enough with ourselves to see it.
I have experienced that we have a good Father, and that such loving benevolence is not chance, but evidence of greatness. It is an invitation.
True Christianity isn’t so much how it is commonly portrayed (and regrettably, practiced), as an emphasis in right behavior to achieve a social credit score sufficient to look down their nose at others in hypocrisy while still, at the core, being just as self centered as anybody else, with the plan of eventually exiting this place so that they can look down their nose from a VIP club in eternity.
It is seeing past the Vegas we ourselves have created of this world, and into the invitation of the wild, the unknown, and the sacred, enough to realize that there was a plan for all of this, and a goal.
You. You were the goal.
And you are not a cosmic orphan, or a cell, or an organism, you are a *son*.
And if his word is true, when you seek your heavenly father, “you will find him, when you seek him with all of your heart.” Which is another way to say, ‘allow yourself to stare in openness and wonder’, which you are doing.
With your heart heading of unselfishness and your obvious openness to wonder, I do think that if you ask him to personally reveal himself to you, you will find yourself further gobsmacked at the result, and also find that in your microscope and telescope that have grown to know a lot about him already!
This is wonderful. Thank you.
Thanks Mark - enjoyed this one. I was brought up on Lyall Watson books courtesy of my mother and he was pretty big on the importance of keeping well Earthed even while stretching the imagination:)
A very good one , Mark. Thanks for the logarithmic trip from electron to light-year. Interesting that we live in the middle of that, but there's a lot of mystery beyond the light-year. What structures exist halfway between the light-year and 14.8 billion light-years? Likely, we cannot fully know or understand. But we continue to imagine.
That's "only" another 10 orders of magnitude on top of the 31 :-).
Some more thought experiments...
It is 11 orders of magnitude from a proton to the width of a human hair, the smallest size we can see.
It is 11 orders of magnitude from the width of a human hair to the diameter of our planet.
Skip 2 orders of magnitude to get up to the size of the Sun.
It is 12 orders of magnitude from the diameter of the Sun to the diameter of our galaxy (100,000 light years).
It is a bit over 5 orders of magnitude from the diameter of our galaxy to the diameter of the known universe.
The total spans 41 orders of magnitude from proton to universe, and the true halfway point is still well within our ability to comprehend: ~350,000m or about the distance to Seattle.
Outside these limits lie quarks, which are assumed to have zero size (but if they have size are at least 10,000 times smaller than a proton) and anything beyond the visible universe, which could also be quite substantial :-).
Thank you once again Mark. I appreciate your perspective and love of your Earth embodied experience. I too choose Life here awakening the exquisite sensing capacity within deep embodiment….🌎
"Abrahamic" religions is a useless category. There are a number of them they are not particularly similar. You're describing Christianity.
that was your take-away from these reflections?
Well, the older I get the more annoying western hegemonic supersessionism feels.