Take a rock. And look at it with your palm. Do you see how the billions of years it took to shape this rock are touching you. Carry the rock with you, if you can. In the palm of your hand might be the best. Perhaps in your mouth would be nice. But even the pocket works.
I heard of someone who was left handed and they were forced to hold a rock in that left hand, so they would learn how to write with the other. That other hand which has the name of being the one to use. At least in English it has.
The language that can be so simple and so incredibly complex too. Like crackle glaze on a tea pot. Layers of shattered glass on clay. It is all here, but also lets tiny amounts of liquid through and so everything changes over time. Complexity increases. Until the tea pot shatters and needs to be assembled again.
Like the bowl I had for almost 30 years. Now it is the memory of one. Pieces of clay, covered in a salt glaze. A three dimensional puzzle I will not be able to properly solve.
Oh, it is so unlike it. Where am I now?
Take a bowl. Look at it with both of your palms. Do you see how the billions of years it took to shape this bowl are now touching you back? Make tea in that bowl. Look at it with your other senses. Here you have what seems to have taken minutes, but also took the same amount of time it took to make the bowl. The paths from eternity to eternity are crossing right in your palms.
Touch the bowl with your lips. The same lips that drank milk for the first time. This is where some of the nourishment has begun to enter your body from the moments your other mouth was cut off from your mother’s placenta. Generations of generations of generations.
This is the place where your soul might one day leave you and rejoin the all encompassing spirit of the eternal universe? Or at least that’s what some of our ancestors taught us? And we were told they are right, they are wrong, they are right, they are wrong; they are, right? Oh, there it was, the name of the hand.
What is right here? And what is left behind? All of them are in this one hotspot of your very existence. By the time you read this, I will be somewhere else. If you wait long enough I will be someone else. Perhaps I will no longer be.
But this very thought of you holding a rock, holding a bowl, drinking the eternal tea from it and maybe realizing that this is all that matters; that very thought is making me smile.
How many times has the earth spun around itself, around the sun, around the moloch of a black hole around some other invisible and distant object, in some kind of matter, since we had this tiny exchange here? Fractions. Fragments. Crackle glaze.
What is my voice in you? And where does it come from? Where is it heading to?
And why?
Take a rock. You were made for it.
It wants to be carried.
Again.