Tuesday, December 31, 2013

2014, A New Verse

I'm obsessed with the idea of the universe.

I'm obsessed with the fact that the atoms and particles that comprise our bodies and dirt and clouds and all the galaxies are traceable to the same materials that were present in the Big Bang.

And as we lean into a new year, I turn over the idea that all this unquantifiable spectacle, experience, and possibilty burst from one singular beginning.

I've been musing on the "universe," the word in particular, and I've been wondering how it came to mean what it means. As I wondered, I thought wouldn't it be nice if uni meaning "one," linked with verse meant "one song?" Wouldn't it be nice if we, as part of the universe, are all part of one collective song? One on-going vibration, one harmony, one rhythm?

I know it all sounds so precious and conspicuously poetic but wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it really be nice if, even at our most desperate - if, in our chronic folly, our habitual fear, our cyclical violence, and our historical shame - that we could know that these are only brief moments of dissonance in an all-encompassing song that is more beautiful and perfect than we can ever know?  And that, even though in the life of a universe a moment can span eras, this dissonace can, at some point, arc and resolve back into harmony, back into grace?

Well I finally looked up the etymology of the word "universe." It comes from the Latin unus or "one" and  versus meaning "turn." One turn.

Like one revolution.

Or maybe, one opportunity.

Or one collective fate.

One collective song.

Here's to 2014, a new verse.



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