A glimpse

Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.

~ Hildegard von Bingen

In this moment of strain and cruelty I’ve drawn some strength from quantum fantasies that flash in for a moment and then disappear just as quickly –

About the hunger for success, to make a mark, to be remembered, to change the world in an instant with grand heroics. How easily we are lured into win or lose, all or nothing. The distortion that suggests that bigger is always better and that enough is never enough.

The fear of fading away and being erased. The demand for credit and ownership over ideas, and their theft. And their co-option. And what it means to own a thought, an idea, a way of being, and what it means to share it freely, and what it means to have it stolen.

Our terror of the reality that we are small. And that everything we do is a small thing, and that all we may possibly offer is just a drop in a bucket.

It is. We are just drops, or maybe smaller still, atoms, particles in drops. We live for a moment, and we dissolve. Anything we think, feel, attempt, or enact is a drop in the bucket always.

What if that is liberating, empowering, holy, miraculous, transformative – and not merely terrifying?

We exalt the Explicit, we idolize the seemingly permanent.

We underestimate the power of the implicit.

I had this weird preachy dream the evening before Inauguration Day 2025. I have didactic dreams like this sometimes. Where I am telling myself something, or someone I can’t see is telling me something – and it’s kind of like just listening to the audio of  My Dinner with Andre and you have no idea who Andre is.

I am dreaming about the recent reading and writing I have done about The Gospel of Mary. All the undiscovered texts, tablets, and runestones. All the wisdom, stories and guidance that have faded from explicit memory, from “recorded” history. The lost written words, the fragments, the broken record.

Dream-thoughts and images move toward  the subtle, internal unfolding influence of oral teachings, the knowledge that lives in our bodies, that is transmitted through sound, and breath, smell, and soul.

I dream-see my online words and writings being swallowed up in a world where large language models have consumed so much of our digital information. I dream-remember papers I wrote in college and graduate school that are unable to be read on obsolete technology.

The fading away appeals to me in my sleep.

I dream of the temptation to contend with the labor and compromises of publishing a paper book, the sorting and shaping of my words and body for sales in exchange for an extended legacy, even if in an out of print used-book shop way, and somehow this chafes too much and my dreaming heart or whoever says “No.”

 I do not need to leave a visible mark. I do not yearn to be a part of the world’s explicit memory. I’m glad enough to have any implicit effect, an invisible impact. Maybe open a few hearts, help a few handfuls of people to locate their courage, to support those grieving. To allow what I have absorbed from other minds and souls to pass into other hearts and bodies and change the fabric of the world, just like each of us do, all of us do, every single moment, with every single breath and gesture.

I wake up thirsty, and a little disoriented in a hotel (in Irvine where my daughter is) in a bed too big for me. I don’t love the silence.

I tap my podcast app and hit resume while I feel my way toward the mini-fridge and the water inside. Podcasty voices mumble across the room.  When I settle back in the big empty bed I hear the podcasters talking about archeology and cuneiform tablets – the burning of libraries, the destruction of scrolls and texts recorded on flammable papyrus. They talk of the fires that solidified and terracotta-ized  words inscribed on tablets of mud. Considered outdated technologies, fires solidified and preserved them under heaps of rubble, eventually burying them deep in the earth while all the scrolls turned to dust and ash…

I begin to drift – in the space between wakefulness and sleep: All the lost words. All the thoughts up in smoke, like incense floating up into the atmosphere, dissolving into the air we breathe, the soil that feeds us. The way these words lived on in all those who read them, wrote them or heard them – whether they were buried underground or transformed into particles of ancient soot circulating through the sky. Living words like whispered messages in our ears that don’t register consciously but enter into us and shape our course.

I dream again, now I wonder if I have ever said, done or written anything aligned with the truth, if anyone has ever received it. Any small glimpse I share may gather with all the others bits of truth floating through and in and around us. Any truths that came toward me or moved through me will remain in play in this wild world. That what is real, whenever we strike upon it, will continue to find its way through us all, even if it is subtle, hidden, invisible, fallen from consciousness. But still animate nonetheless, and moving through humanity in implicit ways.

Erase me in service of what is too essential to be seen or easily considered.

That sounds lovely.

We are tiny parts of a system more complex than we can ever comprehend. We focus too impatiently on instantaneous feedback. We will never see all that our actions have perpetuated in this world. Our inhalations. Our exhalations. This is why life is sacred. This is why soil and water and air and sun and all that lies beyond is sacred.

The smallest things matter not as a matter of faith, but because this is the reality of things. Because we live in an exquisite green-blue bubble in a vast ocean of stars and clusters of minerals and gas and ice.

And nothingness.

This is real.

Our delicacy, our temporality is real and universally shared as a matter of fact.

I breathe in what thousands of living organisms have inhaled and exhaled before me. I eat food grown from loamy carcasses. I shit, die decay and breathe in and out for a time and this alone changes the fabric of the universe if nothing else.

This is just the case.

Every move we make sets off a new causal chain in a million different directions. Each gesture redirects some processes.

And in the “moral universe” which may or may not bend toward justice, outcomes are multiple, infinite, somewhat measurable but mostly utterly immeasurable. We send rings out into eternity.

We can only see so far.  

All that we do matters.

You don’t have to blow up a bridge to change the course of history.

How we carry and comport ourselves, the risks we take, what we can protect, what we must mourn, all matters.

Like the lilies and the sparrows. Like a small lamp on a tall stand or a grain of salt from the sea.

The smallest things matter.

I don’t think this has anything to do with faith.

It is one faint glimpse of the intricate fabric of the universe.