Winter can be long. A winter full of terrible political and environmental news can feel like despair. At the end of our winter break from school, my family visited the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. We delighted in the massive dinosaur skeletons and felt sad and awestruck at the taxidermied jungle animals. There was bleak news for humanity on display and also feats of novel conservationism. The spectacle that moved me unequivocally was Timothy Ferris’s “Dark Universe” planetarium show. Narrated by Dr. Neil deGrass Tyson, it took us for a ride through our own immense galaxy. Then, among many other far reaching concept, panned out and showed us what the galaxy next to ours looks like, then impossibly further to reveal countless other galaxies, any of which would feel like the center of the universe, if we lived there.
These moments of perspective restore me. It propelled me out of my dizzying funk of 7 days without school and residue of holiday madness, into the invisible cradle of an unknowable universe. It reminded me of the old new age adage that succinctly sums up my beliefs about the inter-connectness of all energy and karmic development. We are spiritual beings. We are here to remember that. Our human experience can dull this truth and all but block our connection to our source, but we are the stuff of stars. Our experience is precious and vitally important and our experience is quotidian and a speck on a speck.
Holding these two truths, together at once, is enough to soothe, free and inspire me. We are everything and we are nothing. In an infinite universe, anything and everything is possible. There is vastly more unknown than known and all of human history is but a sliver of Time.
These are the musings I tried to represent in my newest LiveWork Solutions graphic.
You are a spiritual being, having a human experience.
Just Breathe.
Breath expands the container for your soul.
Breathe and bear witness.
What are you here to learn? How can this moment help you grow?
Breathe and repeat. Life is not happening to you. Life is happening for you.