I rest here, gazing out the window at dainty trees who’ve lost their leaves, the pink and white sunrise casting light under a gray ceiling of clouds. Little birds flitting back and forth, pecking up hidden bits of food under decaying leaves while a little squirrel bounds across the evergreen branches.
My mind rolls the planetary clock back to a time when this land didn’t exist. A time when this planet and the surrounding solar system was a swirling dust and vapor mass in the great cosmic dream.
Turning the clock dial I imagine the magical touch of Divine geometry laying down the solar system blueprint, forming each planetary sphere.
One particular gaseous, dusty haze would ultimately form into this lovely planet over billions of years. The elemental spirits of fire, water, soil, air, and the ethers whose gravitational embrace hold it all together, are still securing the matrix upon which every body was formed.
Feeling a heart bursting sense of awe as I imagine all the scenes that would pass by this window… turbulent storms of planetary birth, fires, rains, earthquakes shaking and dividing the firmament, glaciers rising and melting, carving out the riverbeds and mountains, meteors and asteroids whizzing past and some of them crashing to a fiery death only to seed the planet with more bacteria and live-giving nutrients. After a long needed rest the powerfully oxygenated atmosphere would support massive trees, insects and dinosaurs into existence.
Great raptors would fly past my window peering in with their ancient, predator eyes, and dragonflies the size of helicopters would buzz past, their iridescent wings shimmering in the primordial sunlight.
Fast forward the clock, seeing repeated cycles of destruction and resurrection amongst the elements creating an ever-changing landscape on the planetary canvas that would inspire modern artists, poets and mystics alike.
The planetary clock rolls closer in and now I see the indigenous people coming ashore. They make their long houses and teepees, they build communities and make offerings to the spirits as they honor the web of life.
I can imagine them now, nestled along the river’s edge, in the local forests and open fields. They build great stone mounds, talk to their star ancestors, teach their children the ways of their people, and speak of the day’s events around campfire.
In most recent clock time the restless, pioneering settlers arrive bringing their endless hunger for material wealth and quest for religious freedom. In the blink of an eye, less than a century out of all the millions and billions of years where Nature reigned, they transform the landscape with their technology, commerce, transportation, and factories – a din of sound and light pollution that carries on through all hours of day and night on the land just across from my window.
There is talk that we are not and have never been alone as a species and this makes me wonder how the scene outside my window will morph over the next centuries and eons? Where will my spirit be at that time?
Will I be peering out some other window, in a great ship that sails the starry skies and dives into solar portals? Will I be experimenting with a new bio-suit on another planet in a distant constellation? Will I be little more than a distant memory? Perhaps all or none of the above. But the beauty is I can imagine it all, and I am an imaginal spark of Who or Whatever incrediblicious, magnanimous, fantastical imagination that birthed all life, the universes, and everything into existence! Just sitting with that realization leaves me floating in awe.
Regina Chante 