The James Webb Telescope just released its first images of space. The images are incredible–spanning billions of galaxies and trillions of planets. The vastness of the images border on infinite. It’s tough to comprehend and to grasp intellectually. All you can really do is feel it. Feel the awe.

Some had a weird reaction to this image: “Oh wow I’m so small and inconsequential, just some random collection of stardust deposited in the form of a meaty robot. What’s the point of living? Life is meaningless. There is no purpose.”

I had the opposite reaction: “Oh wow this is beautiful and I’m blessed to see it. It feels like I’m put here to do great things, build great relationships, change my small neck of the world and see the shifts reverberate outward like a stone dropping in a lake.”

Amidst all those trillions of solar objects, we alone sit on a planet hosting life intelligent enough to view it. How lucky can you be? Yeah, yeah, maybe there are some aliens out there. I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but I’m not talking about possibilities and potentials. I’m talking about what we know: we’re the ones looking at this.

Besides, you are anything but insignificant. Are you insignificant in the eyes of your children? Your friends? Your husband or wife? Your girlfriend or boyfriend? Your parents? Your business associates? Your dog?

The entire premise of this thing we call life rests on the fact that things are significant. Everything we do matters. If nothing matters, then what the hell are you doing here? Why are you getting up in the morning? Why are you reading this?

I’m here to say, you matter!”

Mark Sisson

“What If Love

Science has revealed at last
What happened in the distant past
Back in the beginning of time
But from what the Cosmos came
Back before the great big bang
It’s finding more hard to describe
It could be anybody’s guess
So is it crazy to suggest

What if love
What if love
What if love is all it was?

And what if that love still sings
Is still alive in everything
Moving through the whole universe
Rising in the light and dark
Hiding in the smallest part
Burning like a flame that always burns
Like the atoms, like the air
Invisible but everywhere

What if love
What if love
What if love is all it was?

What if love were the organizing force
By which the beauty of the world emerged
That joined the particles into molecules
And living cells and redwood trees and bees and birds
And what if to act on love’s behalf, to practice kindness
Is the most natural thing of all
Then when we feel undone
Or sick because we’ve been spun
Around on the wheel of despair
We can just breathe it in
Reach for that source again
Reach out to what’s already there
The mystery from whence we came
Just for a song let’s give it a name

What if love
What if love
What if love is all it was?”

UU singer-songwriter Peter Mayer

““Take off your shoes, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” ~Exodus 3:5
Go outside. Take off your shoes. Breathe sunlight through your fontanelle, the soft spot where the bones of that old story never healed. Feel honey trickle through your neurons, dripping from vertebra to vertebra.
A ray of violet bathes your furrowed brow, washing away the pain, transmuting anger into joyous useful fury.
Rays of golden song-bird yellow caress your throat, healing grief. Your clenched heart-bud softens in a glow of ancient forest green, and 1,000 perfectly wounded petals unfurl.
Knotted thorns in your belly disentangle with a fragrant breeze, the whisper of the name of the Goddess, and you notice the rose that was already there, blossoming in silence.
Now what’s this, fermenting in the cauldron of your hips? Your weary disappointment, turning to purple wine.
Breathe out through the soles of your feet, or so it seems, the shattered sunbeam passing down your spine as through a prism.
Didn’t you know that you were made from infinitesimal love-sparks? This is how you give birth to the rainbow.
But for the surrendered, who have no choice, even light is not enough, beauty is not enough. There is a wilder, more holy secret. The arc of healing does not shower from the sky, it gushes out of the earth.
Give birth to the rainbow that percolates from compost, glow of bone splinters, mushroom spores, song of the earthworm, birth to the piebald treasure of the dead, gift of darkness. Selah.
For we do not exhale through these naked soles, we inhale, breathing loam, pouring our olive-brown energy upward, diastole of crystalline detritus.
We gather tiny relics of our ancestors’ flesh, still warm in embered sacrifice, and fling their swirling ashes into night. They are the stars.”

Fred Lamotte

“My heart welcomes all forms:
It is a pasture for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
a temple for pagan idols, the Ka’aba of Mecca,
and the tablets of the Torah.
My religion is love.
Everywhere love’s caravans go, I follow.”

Ibn Arabi

“In each moment you must decide which is your master – the Truth or the ego.”

Maharishikaa Preeti

“The journeys of our lives are never fully charted. There come to each of us deserts to cross—barren stretches—where the green edge on the horizon may be our destination, or an oasis on our way, or a mirage that beckons only to leave us lost.

When fear grips the heart, or despair bows the head, may we bend as heart and head lead us down to touch the ground beneath our feet. May we scoop some sand into our hands and receive what the sand would teach us:

It holds the warmth of the sun when the sun has left our sight, as it holds the cool of the night when the stars have faded. Hidden among its grains are tiny seeds, at rest and waiting, dormant yet undefeated.

Desert flowers. They endure. Moistened by our tears and by the rains which come to end even the longest drought, they send down roots and they bloom.

May we believe in those seeds, and in the seeds within us. May we remember in our dry seasons that we, too, are desert flowers.”

Margaret Keip

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

Pablo Neruda, born on this day in 1904

“As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.'”

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, published on this day in 1960

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

Nikola Tesla, born on this day in 1856

“The once-born are people who sail through life without experiencing anything that shatters or complicates their faith. They may have financial reverses, problems with their children, and so forth, but they always feel that a kindly God is controlling things. Twice-born souls, on the other hand, are people who lose their faith and then regain it, but their new faith is very different from the one they lost. Instead of seeing a world flooded with sunshine as the once-born always do, they see a world where the sun struggles to come out after a storm but always manages to reappear. Theirs is a less cheerful, less confident, more realistic outlook. God is no longer the parent who keeps them safe and dry. He is the power that enables them to keep going in a stormy and dangerous world. And like the bone that breaks and heals stronger at the broken place, like the string that is stronger where it broke and was knotted, it is a stronger faith than it was before, because it has learned it can survive the loss of faith.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner