“It is no more possible to live in the future, than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.”
Wendell Berry
We were invited to a birthday party for our neighbor, Jeanette Ducourneau, who was born on December 31, 1937. A group of fifty friends and family members gathered in the foyer rural in the village of Clermont Pouyguilles to celebrate her 80th birthday. We first met Jeanette 11 years ago when she unlocked the door to the old colombage ruin on her family’s property which we now call home. It was an honor to be included in the celebration that began on New Year’s Eve day and continued into the early hours of January 1st, heralded by the first and largest moon of the year.
The earliest recorded festivities in honor of a new year arrival date back to ancient Babylon. For the Babylonians the first new moon following the vernal equinox (a day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness) began the new year. In Egypt the new year began with the annual flooding of the Nile, which coincided with the rising of the star Sirius. The Chinese new year, meanwhile, has been a movable celebration, occurring with the second new moon after the winter solstice. In 46 B.C Julius Caesar named January 1 as the first day of the year to honor the month’s namesake, Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, whose two faces allowed him to look back into the past and forward into the future at the same time.
In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote, “Consider the pale blue dot we call Earth. Home. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
While driving home just as the full moon was rising, a shiver of clarity passed through me. I realized that because nothing matters, everything matters. While hurtling through the immeasurable Universe, the Earth has already disappeared into vast shadows with me and all that I hold dear on it. While nothing is connected except by the magic of gravity, we are all connected by the miracle of grace. Right here, right now, every little atom that bumps into every other atom matters because the special circumstances that create each moment of our day will never happen in the same way again. We will never be together in the same way again on this mote of dust we call home.
In the theosophy of light,
The logical universe
Ceases to be anything more
Than the dead body of an angel.
What is substance? Our substance
Is whatever we feed our angel.
The perfect incense for worship
Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.
“Suchness” by Kenneth Rexroth
(Suchness in Mahayana Buddhism means “reality,” or the way things really are. It’s understood that the true nature of reality is ineffable, beyond description and conceptualization)
