The Universe Within and Without

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Created on Saturday, 21 April 2007 17:00

Written by Sally Hamlin

An eleven-year-old girl lies on a hillside, on her back, snuggled deeply into a thin, borrowed sleeping bag that offers little cushion against the ground. It is mid-August, night has fallen, and beside her, and all around her, lay twenty or so other girls, some chatting and giggling, some already deep into sleep.

This little girl, however, is wide-awake, and silent.

Inside her head she hears the loud sound of her blood coursing through her body, and in another layer that echoes her own internal universe, she hears the rushing of the planets and stars that whirl over her head. This sound is deeper, and resonates both against and within her, and comes from below her at the same time. This is new hearing. New knowledge. Through her, right to the ground below her, deeper and deeper to the core of the earth and back through her again, and up towards the heavens, the sound resonates.

Her eyes grow bleary with the sense of awe for what she is witnessing above her in the night sky, for what she is feeling in her body. She feels small, tiny, infinitesimal, insignificant. She feels invisible, transparent. She feels herself disappear into the vastness, melding into both earth and sky. Energy waves charged like currents move through her. There is no separation between her and the earth below and the sky above.

Tears fall from both eyes, landing on her pillow, forming soft pools beside her head. She is grinning. Never before in her life has she seen or felt anything like this. She is awake all night, just watching, feeling, being.

She is there, awake, as the stars move and change place. The crickets and night insects and frogs from a nearby pond become still. She hears faint snores and nighttime mumbles from the others deep in sleep, but she is not sleepy.

She doesn’t want to miss a thing, and she doesn’t.

Stars shoot, leaving trails of spectacular color. One after the other they take turns. They form and arrange themselves into shapes, and then seem to trade places, shape-shifting away into other distant galaxies.

The stars then fade and disappear as the cooling summer air lifts faint trails of misty cloud overhead, shrouding them in wisps of surreal and flowing summer night apparel.

She feels the dampness of deep night come upon her as weight against her body, but it does not feel heavy, just alive, as evidence of Life.

All night she lays in awe, in wonder. Who can she tell about this? How can the others sleep, miss this? What words does she know that describe her experience with any adequacy?

Morning comes with a soft brightening of sky in the east. A few lone early birds stir, calling to mates and young ones.

She hears a dog bark in the distance.

The faint scent of an old fire comes to her over the meadow from the wooded campground.

The sun now crests the horizon and paints pink and magenta halos across the sky. The last of the visible stars turn and blink their final signal to her from the yellowing canopy.

The girl who last eve hiked this hill and sang camp songs with the others after supper and ate sticky s’mores, is not the one who now lies wide awake in the early dawn. She now possesses something more precious than gold: she knows who she is within the vast universe of which she is a part. She is forever changed, having now seen and felt the very Life that surrounds her, that is her.

In the morning, she tries to tell a camp counselor what happened, but her words are lost to morning activities, and she gives up trying to describe it.

Besides, it feels too holy, like trying to describe God. And how do you describe God?

Then life happens. She returns to her family, who love her, whom she loves. The middle of seven children, from a poor family, she begins seventh grade in September. Troubles too vast for a small girl’s world take center stage. In November the President is killed. Their favorite teacher, a nun who plays softball during recess and hits balls out of the playground, is the one who now tells her students this terrible news. Sister Nicolas cries openly in the front of the room, standing beneath the painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The girl’s mother, sick with cancer, is getting sicker.

The following summer, with only a week until her return to the camp of the summer before, the girl jumps into her uncle’s murky pond. Her foot finds a sharp piece of glass in the muddy bottom. Ten stitches. There will be no camping this year. She feels sad and desperate. She wants to go back to that hillside and sleep outside and feel God.

In October her mother dies, succumbs to the cancer that bore disease through her body for the past three years. The girl has just turned thirteen.

The world seems too hard.

She grows up fast. Too fast.

Earth Day, 1970. The first one. I was there. I was there on the Common in Cambridge, playing Frisbee with friends from BU. We wore cut off bell-bottoms and t-shirts and beads, our leather sandals tossed onto nearby blankets. Far-out music was carried through loudspeakers, interspersed with words of earnest speeches.

But we were there, celebrating our youth, our exuberance, being alive and groovy; it didn’t take much for us to be excited about life then, as I recall. We were surrounded by hundreds of others who felt as we did about the world, our Mother. That first Earth Day I felt something stir within me, the dormant knowledge of what I knew to be truth, about who I was, who we all were, and about our connection with the Universe surrounding us, that was us, that was beyond us.

Earth Day 1970, focused on celebrating our wonderful planet, offered me a creative way to make a contribution to my world.

I returned to Buffalo an activist. Not unlike many of you who came of age in the sixties, I decided, as Adrienne Rich says, to ‘cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world’.

I joined with others to begin recycling programs. We formed four food co-ops in neighborhoods where students and poor people lived and where there were no grocery stores. We started a bakery collective called Yeast-West. We planted organic gardens, became urban back-to-the-landers.

Not seeing any separation in the caring for the earth and for our own bodies, we women formed consciousness-raising groups, focused on support for one another, learning about self-help. Our connection with the earth and all its inhabitants was what pulled many of us into Vietnam War activism.

We were creating healthier neighborhoods, creating employment, trying to change the world.

According to philosopher Ken Wilber, we were right on track for our generation. The baby boomer generation has, he says, like each awakening generation, its strengths and weaknesses. Our strengths include “an extraordinary vitality and idealism, plus [a] willingness to experiment with new ideas beyond traditional values. These strengths can evidence extraordinary creativity.” Our weakness, what Wilber refers to as “boomeritis” and about which he has written an entire book by that name, includes an “unusual dose of self-absorption”, resulting in a “generation with an extraordinary mixture of greatness and narcissism” that “infects everything we do”.

With this particular affliction, Wilber says, we can be so bemused, so entranced, by our own belief in our self-importance, that we can miss the point entirely: that we cannot live without one another, nor can we fix everything, perfectly, nor ever get it all right, once and for all. That we, like the Universe, hold every imperfection, every black hole, and each implosion and dying star within us.

Wow. I know sermons are supposed to be uplifting. Supposed to be something that somehow makes you feel better about yourself in this world that holds so many contradictions, challenges, frustrations.

And I suppose that is especially true in spring, the season that signals hope. This year, however, spring feels strangely different. It has been a difficult one. Long spring rains and flooding, with little sunshine. Gruesome killings on college campuses. Grim daily news about the impact of climate changes upon our planet that seems to be unfixable. I admit to feeling powerless against the magnitude of the work at times.

It is when I think there must be a way, one way which I cannot see or get to, a way for us to be, or believe, or act, or become, or whatever…..that there is ONE WAY only, for us to be successful against the powerful forces against which we rail, that my ‘boomeritis’ affliction rages and I become despondent over my helplessness. I know that these feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy are strongest when I have let myself drift away from the love of others, and when I begin to buy into the illusion of my separateness, or when I deny my lack of need for others with which to walk the path.

During these times, I forget my experience on that hill on that August night long ago, of the Universe within, of God.

Now, thirty-seven years after that first Earth Day, here we are in Concord together, only a few miles from where I played Frisbee with friends in 1970. Another war is raging. The climate has warmed, melting vital ice shields. Our planet seems in even more danger of moving towards irreversible change.

In these low times, I wonder, does it matter what I do, what we do?

Of course it does. It matters what we do. It matters that we are here. It matters that we share with our children our passion for our physical world, and that we talk and teach about the mark our carbon footprints leave behind. It matters that we model our values by how we live our life, and by how we celebrate it.

We say to our babies at every dedication, that “[they] come to us with stardust in [their] hair, the rush of planets in [their] blood, [their] heart beating out the seasons of eternity, with a shining in [their] eyes like the sunlight”. We touch their brow, their eyes, lips, heart and hands with a rose and with water, symbols of Life. These are not just hollow words, they reflect the truth, the wholeness of who we each, in our very essence, are.

And this matter, matters. We must struggle against “the optical delusion” that Einstein warns us against, the one that becomes a prison, and work to continue to ‘free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all”.

We may never know the impact of our actions upon this earth. We may not live long enough to witness all the repercussions that our actions may bring to bear, or for the impact of our presence to be known. But we can be reminded that in the release of attachment to outcome that “the true Mystery yields itself, the face of Spirit secretly smiles, the Sun rises in your very own heart and the Earth becomes your very own body, [that] galaxies rush through your veins while the stars light up the neurons of your night.”

Take the time today to celebrate with our dear Mother. I pray for each of you, for all of us: “May we know earth, our mother of old, as our friend; as we were bred of dust and stars, may we know her fate as ours.”

And remember, somewhere on the planet, at this very moment, on a hillside perhaps, lies a child, discovering who she is.

May it be so. Blessed be. Amen.

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