Heavenly Bodies and Dust Motes

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Simulposted from The Wild Wild Left.

I was sent pictures by Lady Libertine, the one that inspired her essay, and thought about it a long time. She is right, it is not an easy metaphor; but indeed, a compelling one.

I never could, or did write about it. But Friday, in a moment of total unthinking, I had a similar train of thought light up. Its one that has crept into my consciousness often, and I am positive, it has been the rehashed subject of thinkers for ages, and my own thoughts are echoes of things I’ve never read. As usual.

There really is nothing new in the Universe. Not even in my own brain. I’d been here before.

Still, popping up in a rare moment of total internal dialogue silence, I deeply enjoyed entertaining the thought.

It started with the tiniest of spiders, in the largest of basements.

I clean a basement the size of a couple basketball courts, that’s equally as empty. In this new construction, hermetically sealed environment, experience has taught it must be a quarterly experience. Bi-annually, things in the corners growl back.

Did I mention, I’m highly arachnophobic?

We waited the 6 months once, and despite the illusion of walking into a pristine environment walking down the stairs that summer, the corners belied gargantuan wolf spiders and ginormous webs. My protector and son, kept look out, while my shop vac decimated their ranks, as they growled and charged me.

Friday was a comparable piece of cake.

Inch by inch, I shop-vac’ed every inch of their floor, working my way toward the dreaded corners. There were no wolf spiders, no huge webs, but the tendril thin wisps of finer beings kept wisping my face and hair.

There was almost no signs of life, save the little shell remnants of other bugs consumed by the arachnid denizens, on the floor. I was singing Christmas songs from the CD I burned for my darling bosses, songs while we played while decorating, surrogate Mom and Daughter, trying to feel the Holiday in some compensation for “how it should be” but never really is. The echo of the empty concrete place and their deafness allowed me to project and explore vocals in a rare way. Then I fell silent, and was nothingness in a zen moment of just being: there was nothing but my motion, my reach, my repetitive motion and my breathing. It became rhythm, balance, control without control… doing. Being. In the moment, and the moment was nothing, and everything.

I was sucking up the rolly-polly bug shells, and reaching for the filaments when I saw her, a fiber thin being, scrambling away from vibrations she must have felt. Others, closer, moved not at all.

I felt a familiar pang of remorse, the remorse I always feel broadly killing anything for daring to be in my world. I felt it amplified, and thought of someone I knew who talked to a spider once on acid. I wondered if she feared me, if there was a moment of “What enormous God is smiting me?” or “That alien thing is tearing me from my world…” I thought of her life’s brevity, compared to our longevity.

Before I could entertain my emotion, and before the tears of empathy reached my eyes, I had already moved to us. The hilarity of it all, that we too, could just be a universe on a dust mote, in some larger universe. My 46 years may be to other beings the equivalent of the 4 days moths live to us. Our eternity may be a week not vacuumed by some larger being in some larger universe.

World or Mote??

I laughed, at the fallacy of it all. I laughed at my petty concerns, my brief existence, felt the glory of being 12 and looking up at the ancient sky and feeling infinitesimal and omnipotent, all in one second of being.

I felt old thoughts, revisited.

When we look far in enough in, will we see ourselves staring back at us? Or when we look far enough out? Will science ever reach that inexplicable point? Will we reel in horror, or dance with glee?

I don’t have to reach so far to you. I am you, I am the spider, I am the alien monster of the dust mite, a giant of his world, I am the time, for there is no time, I am now, it is always now, it is always then, past and future.

That’s the kind of moment it was.

Are we hearing the vibrations, now, unlike the oblivious others? Will it matter when both the knowing and the clueless are swept up in the same inevitable sweep?

Next time I will let her get away, and see if I can change history.

For one being…..

Another reflection of ourselves.

In the end we are both heavenly bodies and dust motes.

Laugh, cry, prosper, fail, hurt, reach the epitome of bliss… its all a microsecond, and meaningless.

Know? Nothing is meaningless in the knowing.

It started with the tiniest of spiders, in the largest of basements.

It lasted a moment, the barest moment, but for one second, I knew.