Embryo of Life
My friend gave me a book with the most incredible collection of photos taken through the lenses of the Hubble Telescope over the thirty years it has been orbiting Earth. Color enhanced images of gases, hard matter and debris from light years away cover the pages. One photo in particular reminds me of an embryo in fetal position in the womb of space floating weightless enveloped space dust and gases.
I have pondered that photo and came to the conclusion we are all of that place in the heavens. Whether your belief ties with science and the big bang theory, native lore of our creation or Biblical passages, all civilizations look to the expanding universe to try and decipher their own existence. We all find magic in the stars most visible to us, but there are other stars millions of light years away, that I am sure are still fostering life and changing hourly.
James Michener wrote in his non-fiction book Hawaii of the first bird to drop a seed on the islands and how the rich volcanic soils and coastal rains nourished it to life where it clung alone, until another bird dropped another seed, or the ocean sloshed a few onto the shores. Then many more found their way, and soon there were trees and plants to foster the existence of the habitat necessary for the birds to thrive. Beneath it all though, were nutrients deposited in the formation of our universe and galaxy that were mixed in molecular marriage deep in our Earth. These compounds uniquely placed, were the very embryos of life.
We are complicated in our makeup; nitrogen, hydrogen, proteins, the list goes on. All bestowed on us from perhaps millions upon millions of light years away. Was it by “God” and the Creation where every move is somehow orchestrated, or happenstance as the explosions occurred? Each of our faiths tell the story as does the Earth itself. I see the universe on my paths as I walk, beautiful arrays of color represented in small stones all made up of different elements that give life to the Earth. Many were at one time twisted walls of basement rock from the very beginnings of our galaxy. The rock surfaced in places, fractured, eroded, layered over by other soils and some standing stoically as pillars, survivors of a time we have no written record of, just summation using the rocks themselves and complicated mathematical computations to determine time.
Either way, life is something to marvel. You see it in the birds’ deft flight; a flock of black birds who in a ballet in the wind, wake your senses. Turning and diving, rising and falling as if choreographed. As a group they careen, sometimes hundreds of them, in the wind. They seem to stich heaven and Earth into a fabric of endless life. They are called to do their part in the ebb and flow of Earths’ cycles. The sandhill cranes, geese, turkey vultures come and go with the seasons just as the snows in winter and the flowers in the spring. Incredible.
The natives followed their fellow living beings, calculating correctly they were all in this together, a cycle of life, living and death. The elk, deer, birds, lizards were all a piece of the land blessed by the heavens and a part of life’s cycle. Too, the indigenous came to know the universe and the power it had to move the oceans, bring fertility and exert pressures on the Earth we may be too unaware of to understand now.
We are a microcosm of life, or not in space. Humans are tied, just like the birds or rabbits to the energy space generates in it’s shifting, colliding and explosive behaviors. As for Earth in the universe, it is but one piece of dust floating on all our worlds’ oceans. Energy that comes from the vastness of space ripples across our planet and we either catch it or we don’t.
Many prophets that are scribed in the Bible, on monuments and tablets talk of positive energy or faith for good over evil just as it was suggested by Christ for Simon and Andrew to hold faith against demons. Have we failed to understand those teachings? Energy is racing across the universe, we’ve only to catch it. Faith is a confidence that with work, together we can achieve anything. We were born unto the universe that surrounds us we have to understand how to harness it as one.
Man has endeavored to solve life’s meanings from the most basic of concepts to the complicated formulas of the laboratory. I find it interesting that all faiths look to the universe always for the answers yet often shun what it has to say. Different faiths from Christian to Indigenous surround themselves with a “beginning” set forth in the universe knowing their answers lie in the stars. Indeed, the answers to the puzzle of all life are held in “space”. Once we understand that the universe is the embryo of life, we might come to terms with the forces that divide us. We are but a spec, we have to know that.
