The ego is a monster
It lashes out in fear
I relax; it plunges through me
And we simply disappear

In fish-stink markets
drunk again
unready for attack
I vomit down the wishing well;
dull animal stares back.

These forms arising from within:
illusion without end.
These animals were always mine
to butcher, or befriend.

I do not mind:
This hole, this heart,
the knots were loosely tied.
The desert’s lip is at my boot,
machete by my side.

Sometimes when things get rough or crazy, I find it useful to remind myself of the impossible hugeness of the universe we live in.

The size of the structures we see with our telescopes dwarfs all human concerns the way a cruise ship dwarfs a microbe. Actually, the difference in scale is likely many orders of magnitude greater than this. You can’t begin to wrap your mind around how unbelievably BIG everything is.

The picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy above is linked to a larger version of itself. Contemplate its immensity for a few moments. At this distance, our Sun would not even be visible, let alone Earth. This is a vortex of matter and energy, like our own Milky Way, containing hundreds of billions of stars. Most of what we see here is gas illuminated by starlight, not the stars themselves. (The few stars with “compass points” are actually in the foreground, in our own galaxy.)

I do not for once dismiss the unique opportunity that embodiment in human form presents. However, it is so easy to get caught up in the conceits and concerns of the ego. Astronomical contemplation provides a quick reminder of the place we occupy in the scheme of things, physically at least. How small our petty problems appear when viewed in the light of 100 billion suns.

And between the galaxies is space, an empty vacuum pierced by lethal radiation from all directions. There is so much more space than matter, it makes even the galaxies look small.

We float in space, a tiny bubble of air in the void. How impossible and unlikely that we would be here at all. How tragic when we see nothing but ourselves in the world around us, lost in a hall of mirrors.

Here is a cluster of galaxies, each as big and full of stuff as the one above, and as our own.

“CLEAR THIS CHANNEL!
This is Crisis Control
and we need an empty vessel.
We gotta let the message through.”

the wilderness can absorb
all that noise
deep in you
and when you return
at last!
an empty mirror meets your gaze
now the message flows
now the badgers stop and listen
to the empty field
where daisies waving in the wind
tune in white noise

Evening gulls’
squawking fades and falters,
and the gulping crows
        revise their last oration.

Little mussels nestle
into curves of soft
green mud,
borrowing space
        from        some        stones.

And a lobster laughs
and a cormorant
follows his fish
                          alone.

***

City, scrape, truck.
Sick surplus.
Rush return to restless wait.
Back again in nexus.

This desert, flesh
rehearsing sermons,
pockmarked shield of mirrors.

Inside, the roaring
tide is pounding, pulling,
pounding at the future.
Unless…
Unless…
Remember something
calming, mussels,
                         still.

Now
A restless cell
divides
It ends, yet multiplies:
Thus the many-mirrored Mother
in disjunction never dies.
I am one and I am many, in an endless string of lives!
And so the chambers deep within me
reconnect and ramify.

(Such sewers –
Freud abhorred them.
Dr. Jung at least explored ‘em.)

A light?
Yet even here one shines.
Who would have guessed, in waking grayness
That there was another side
to this milky maze of drainage
with which each of us is mined?

There it dances
at the edge,
on the lip of sagging matter
Lighting up a land we’ve left behind.
And our body is the shadow it defines.

These dark waters running,
surging
Passing boulders, cliffs of stone
Through valleys rank with centaurs sunning,
Forests sweetly overgrown
with vines
At last
In moonlight full emerging,
The stream another million finds
In the Dreamtime all converging –
O star-seared sea! O endless Mind!