Are you awake?

Waking Up

“Rejoice!

You have just given me the universe,

put it in my hands, held it to my lips,

oh, here on my knees have I been fed

the entire sum of all created matter,

the everything

that came from nothing.

Rejoice!

                              Madeleine L’Engle

“In the beginning

there was the cold and the night

prophets and angels gave us the fire and the light.

Man was triumphant

armed with the faith and the will

that even the darkest ages couldn’t kill.”

                              Billy Joel (Two Thousand Years)

          Right now in the night sky you can see the International Space Station pass by.  It appears as large and bright as Venus.  I confess that I could look at the pictures that have come back from the Hubble telescope endlessly---they are amazing works of art.  Do you ever wonder what is out there?

Once, when I was living in California back in the sixties, I was shown an unidentified flying object.  Honestly---and I wasn’t even smoking any of that funky weed that was so famous at the time.  It was morning—broad daylight---when the Major from the apartment next door asked me through the open window, “Want to see a UFO?”  I went out to the porch and, sure enough, there was an oval disc, perfectly silent, sitting just below a cloud cover.  As we watched, a flight of fighter jets came up from the nearby Air Force base and headed in its direction.  Two other identical UFO’s glided up next to the first and then all three went straight up at a speed that made the fighter jets look like toys.  The Major seemed amused; not surprised at all.  He must have seen this before.

The universe is so huge and full of stars and galaxies and we certainly are not its only inhabitants or even its most intelligent.  I think that others are watching to see whether we are going to survive our own greed, before they get involved.  As long as we are still killing each other over land and resources and ideologies, I doubt we will make the cut.  We homo-sapiens need an evolutionary kick in the pants to get us to the next level.  That leap comes one human heart at a time; we must wake up and take our consciousness seriously.  We have been given so many reasons to rejoice.

                              Keeping the faith,

                              Jane