At this moment you stand in quiet contemplation.
Take a breath. There you are.
Yes – at this moment, when after
decades of war and terrible victories,
You remain standing, still and straight as a steeple,
in the centre of your rooms, towns, cities, countries,
Planet. All that you know.
By now you will have experienced
The imprudent comings and goings of strangers, of giants
Who existed in a time now-forgotten.
Kneel down. Put your ears close and listen
for chatterings of what’s to come.
It’s at moments like these that you imagine the inconceivable,
Grasp at fragments of ephemeral thought,
Reach out for a liminality that cannot be felt or seen.
It’s at moments like these that you seek guidance on what it means to be human.
Stepping into the vast slate of a new world, you were once frail and naked,
Barely awoken from the warm darkness of your mothers’ bodies
into a long, long dream.
And all at once you realized that you were alive,
That the world around you was alive,
That there were others just like you.
I picture you now, one by one.
You dreamed, first of simple things:
Of fire, of sunlight, of fields and running rivers.
You dreamed together; you put your arms around your children,
bodies pressed close like hands in prayer.
And oh, the things your dreams become!
Your artists who paint themselves pink and purple,
your musicians who fill rooms with unsaid words.
You dreamed, very beautiful things indeed.
But now you realize: what weight do your dreams hold in a world that you cannot know?
You are not singular, yet at the same time you are utterly alone.
So open your eyes again
And look out at your surroundings.
Until now, you have not seen many things—
To be human is to revel in the bliss of unknowingness.
And at this moment, you’re still here, on your little Blue Marble
Caught and suspended in the transient nothingness of dilated time
Able to be cradled in one’s palm.
You call it The Universe.
The Magpie Blog 
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