Wandering thoughts on love and riches...

This morning I slept late. Usually the creep of pink across the wall as dawn unfurls her banners will rouse me. Not today. The clouds hang low and sullen, gunmetal shutters closed across the bowl of sky. Space is only about 12 miles above us, straight up. No weather, no air just a deep cold dark studded with the fires, the signposts of the Universe. How do the fires of the sun burn without air? If someone really big put a saucepan lid over it, would it go out? No global warming then, nor yet nuclear winter just an icy blanket of black velvet dark encrusted with distant suns too far to light our brief candles.

There was a science fiction tale I never understood. Heinlein I think, although the years have carved lacunae in my memory leaving brain lint where knowledge once nestled, his people were preparing for the coming of the stars, a sunset that led them to destroy their civilisation whenever it came. They were crushed, driven mad by the sight of the stars. Was it the awful splendour that defeated them or were they just scared of the dark? I have felt awe. Been speechless in the presence of some beauty inaccessible to Man's creative talents. Something that just exists and is so near perfection that my eyes burn with tears to gaze upon it...but it has never diminished me because a grain of sand, a pearl, a Universe can sit side by side with one cell discarded from my skin and claim kinship with its heart rending beauty.

I recently saw photographs of waterdrops on line, the strange crystalline shapes it took responding to sound, the spoken words of love, of hate, of prayer, of anger. Before and after prayer the lineaments changed from disjoint into harmony. I know my liquid spirit shifts and shapes when I take it into company. It moves and dances to the pulls of joy and jabs of anger I encounter, opening like a flower to the gentle touch of love. What is love? For me it is the care I take not to cut myself even with the painless slice of a very sharp knife or to avoid the blundering crushing pain of a thumb beneath a hammer and applyiing that same care to others.

Love thy neighbour as thyself. I embrace the spirit, not religion, but these words ring true. The same survival instinct that pulls me back from touching heat, from poison, needs to be applied like a poultice to the world of people I encounter. Side by side we share the beauty of the stars, the flowers that never worry if their petals are too gaudy, sexy enough, expensive enough. The trees that never fret if they have not as many leaves as their neighbour in the forest. The soil that feeds all equally without question, yielding more to those who give back and nurture it.

When did we learn to believe in poverty when abundance is the rule? Perhaps it is when we came to think that the toys that decorate the trash heaps of the world and travel back and forth unwanted on stinking barges without a port equal riches. A smile, the hand of friendship, the kindness done unnoticed, unremarked, the care we give ourselves and others, this is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And here you can find love.