LIght On a Winter Morning

I wondered what to pay attention to this morning, going here and there, across town and home again.  People? The radio?  The weather?  Ideas?

No.  It was sunlight.

I noticed as I turned onto the main street traversing Monterey that the day's palette of colors was coolly silver with tones of blue and gray.  Everywhere.  Everything, even ugly things, were cast in a special light.  Not so bad to see a big ocean whose surface was riffled by an onshore breeze and the sky's reflection broken into infinite bits of varying blue.  Not so bad to see an ocean look like hammered silver and birds stitching it to the sky with crooked black wings in silhouette.  The rooftop of a grand but dark old building, overgrown with a winter bloom of gold moss and lichen, looked like it had come right up out of the very earth itself.  There were twin round towers of pale silver, tubes that if tall enough could transport hope straight up and joy straight down from angels, silver themselves, as you know.  A king must have passed through, littering the scene with casually flung coins; rain puddles and dew were as good as coin  or sequins tacked to cloaks and scabbards.  If you squinted your eyes just so, that is.  And I did.  Of course I did.

Rainbows: Images of the Universe

I've never heard anyone angry that they were seeing a rainbow.

Every color of light in the visible and invisible spectrums exist at once in a rainbow. Every light frequency, every wavelength that we perceive as light, is there.  It's sunlight shattered into bits by water droplets.

I was thinking about myself and what I'm doing right now, what I can hear, see, smell and feel at this exact minute.  I was also thinking that at the very instant that I'm experiencing all that I can, the whole universe exists all at once.  Every possible thing that can happen IS happening right now - somewhere.  Not only on our planet, but above it, in the universe, in all the universes.

If we could freeze this instant with the snap of our fingers, we'd see that every aspect of the human condition exists somewhere and is in play.  Every possible sound is being emitted.  Every single imaginable bit of matter that jiggles in the form of energy organized into shape or not even organized into any shape - exists.

I kind of like the idea that every bit of every thing or the nothing in between the things - not specific enough for you? - has always existed and always will.  We are breathing air molecules that could have been breathed by a monkey in New Guinea 20 years ago.  We eat food that grew in dirt that is made of plants and rocks that disintegrated hundreds of years ago.  Everything is trading bits and pieces of every other thing that ever existed or will exist on the planet for all time.

We are all big piles of minerals and a large sack of water that used to be somewhere else before - lots of other places many other times - but now we are using the stuff to be who we are at this point now.

If you are so proud to be unique and special, well you have a right to be.  You managed to organize the minerals that you have in a way that no one ever has before.  Then it will disperse and become many other things eventually.  Your exhaled breath will help become something else somewhere else, just like it always has.

A rainbow exists but it does not exist.  It is an explanation of light that is in no one place in particular, which is exactly what excites us to be the first to pin one to a spot and find the pot of gold underneath its end.  But, in truth the gold is in the exemplification of simultaneous existence of all things at all times.  And just when you get that, the rainbow disappears, as ethereal and intriguing as life itself.