In the cafe is where I write. Where I collate these random thoughts into something readable, edit them, fashion and trim them, cut out the fat and add some salt. Oh wait I don’t need all that - er just collate them then . . . but that sounds kind of formal, wait what’s a better word for formal? academic? no even worse let’s start over . . . It goes like that until I come up with an image and a feeling that I’m happy with. I write until I’m happy - that’s the truth and then I close my journal, stash my phone, get up on my bike and ride home.
This morning I got on my bike and cruised down Broadway, past Central Market, past the Hildebrand intersection (if you time the lights you can slip right thru), past Press (one of my spots) all the way through downtown (about 6 miles) and into Southtown, the groovy chic addendum, er alcove, er sibling neighborhood, er nearby bower, er rustic accompaniment to the downtown and stopped at Brown (another one of my spots).
They weren’t open yet but I tethered my pony and took a seat at a table that Joe had recently setup in the patio. He kindly brought me a glass of ice water and said “Give me 10 minutes.”
So I looked around: flowers were blooming in the narrow hedge alongside the parking lot, the sky was blue and the sun was rising. Clouds floated in a random formation above the horizon. They block the sun (for which I am grateful) and bring the rain so the flowers can bloom - perfection. ‘The secret of life is that there is no secret at all. It’s all out in the open.’ I thought.
’Maybe that’s being simplistic,” I mused ‘or maybe it is simple. Feel something. Whatever it is you feel is a miracle. It could be that you feel nothing at all, it could have been that you didn’t exist, it could have been that there was no universe and no anything. Not even nothing. That’s funny actually, not even nothing.
How can there be not even nothing? How can there be a person that can even ask that question might be a better question. We cruise along thru our life without noticing every single little miracle that makes up our day, every day. The secret is there is no secret. Everything that is, is yelling in your face - you are!”
I pull out my book, ‘Universe in Creation’ by Roy R. Gould. His main point is that the universe was endowed from the start with the blueprint or as he calls it the infrastructure for life to arise. Ofcourse it took 10 billion years. But it could have been otherwise, it could have been still born.
He blows my mind several times a page, which is fun, and causes me to wonder about things like that. That there is no secret to life, everything that is, is yelling in your face - you are! It’s a true miracle that we exist and can think about it. I think about it.
I have an experiment for you, more of a demonstration really. Check this out. Take your hand and hold it at arm’s length and hold up one finger. No, not the middle one, one of the others or your thumb. If you point that at the sky or just above you wherever you are and imagine the universe out there, that point, that half square inch above your finger extended into deep space, expanded or extrapolated, as it would be, zooming out into the cosmos, that half square inch would contain thousands of light years of space, millions of galaxies. The observable universe is 46.5 billion light years across and contains 100 billion galaxies. They figure the whole universe is at least 250 times larger than that or somewhere around 7 trillion light-years across. You can put your hand down now.
We live in an amazing universe. It was created in a moment of passion. So passionate that it exploded and the heat and energy of that explosion was so intense that it spread out at 10 zillion trillion billion miles an hour (from the size of a proton to a thousand times bigger than our solar system in less than a second if you can imagine that) and then started to cool down. Everything started to calm down, hydrogen and helium atoms (the simplest elements) were able to form, and the fundamental forces of nature began to operate on them because it cooled at just the right rate - not too fast and not too slow. If it hadn’t happened that way we wouldn’t be here. Just ask the astrophysicists, they’ve been working this out.
Gravity (one of the fundamental forces of nature) caused the hydrogen to condense into massive objects called stars and they began ‘burning’ (nuclear fusion) and in their burning, in their divine crucibles, they began to form the other elements of our universe - 118 that we have discovered so far.
And not just in their burning but in their exploding at the end of their starry life spans. Boom! Pow! Here’s iron, here’s fricking molybdenum, here’s oxygen and here’s carbon. Ingredients for life. You may not have heard much about molybdenum but it’s a trace mineral, essential for life and found in foods such as milk, grains, nuts and leafy vegetables.
All that was left to do was for this exploded star’s gaseous remains to condense into a planet, cool down, accumulate some water and start up the miraculous process called life. What the heck!? Nobody has a clue how that happened.
But somehow it happened and we are here, the descendents of that first tiny microscopic organism that came alive 4 billion years ago. Wow. A simple cell with some RNA and a few proteins learned how to replicate, how to metabolize and how to survive.
One of the many amazing things about life on this planet is that the first 3 1/2 billion years was all microbes. Life couldn’t get it together to build anything bigger than single celled bacteria and archaea, or maybe it didn’t feel the need. It was content with single celled organisms and the oceans filled up with tiny marine borne life things.
I tend to think of them as life things because they really didn’t have much of a personality. A personality wouldn’t do you any good back then anyways because there was no society to determine ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and no hierarchy to determine worth, just a bunch of entities floating around, all pretty much doing the same thing.
Joe opens the door. I put down my pen, go inside, “What up Joe?” and start the conversation.
”Can you imagine living 3 billion years ago? Just floating around in the warm ocean and being microscopic?”
”Yeah. Not really.”
”Me either.” I said.
”I mean who would you date?”
”Good point. What would you do all day?”
“Explore new ways to mutate I guess.”
“That could be fun.” Joe is cool, I like him.
“What would you like?” he says, after we have explored the question for awhile.
“I would like a chai tea latte with oat milk.” I respond and slip my card into the receptor, gain approval and sign off with a signature that looks like a horizon with a wobbly sun rising thru a scribbled sky.
I return to my table, I return to my book and my pen, insert my ear buds into my ears and call up Carla Morrison who starts singing Disfruto:
Me complace amarte
I am pleased to love you
Disfruto acariciarte y ponerte a dormir
I enjoy caressing you and putting you to sleep
Es escalofriante
It’s thrilling
Tenerte de frente, hacerte sonreír
having you in front of me, making you smile . . .
It sounds to me like a love song from the planet to us, from the universe to our planet from one to another.
If you liked this post why not share it?
Have something to say? Let’s start a conversation.
A new rohn report every Thursday. Sign up for notifications.
Want to see more stories? They can be found in the archive here.
in the cafe