Reflections on Life. Colin E Knowles

are stunned.

      You see

      The stark, archaic unreality

      Of this doctrine

      In the world around you

      You turn to go

      The voice whispers behind you

      Remember

      Blind faith and trust.

      You walk into the marble foyer of the office tower

      To the lifts and up forty floors

      To the observation level.

      Perhaps there will be meaning when you can see

      The city all around you

      Like a god?

      The doors open and you move to the glass wall.

      You see the city spread before you

      Huge and complex

      Patterns of humanity

      Energy and movement

      Cars creeping like ants

      Through the box buildings.

      You know there is order in this apparent chaos,

      Somehow it works.

      Man is restless and boundlessly creative

      But do the blue sky, the distant green rolling hills

      And the still sea of the bay beyond

      Beckon you to a greater reality?

      The cold, black, starry night sky

      Spreads from horizon to horizon.

      You look up.

      You know that there are billions of people

      Feeling, touching, living

      On this airy, wet, rocky speck

      In this one galaxy

      In time and space

      In infinity

      So you ask this universe where is meaning?

      The dark void whispers to you

      You live in

      An expanding cosmology

      Of fields and forces

      Matter and energy

      Everywhere

      Popping in and out of existence

      Uncertainty and probability

      Everywhere.

      The classical absolute

      Clockwork universe

      Of touch and feel

      Common sense

      And blind religious faith

      In an all powerful God.

      Gone.

      You live in

      A universe of

      Rubbery space/time

      Mass energy equivalence

      Light speed constancy

      And a hoped for unity of all

      But still one arrow of time

      Flying into the future.

      A universe created from a point of nothing.

      A big bang.

      Space expanding

      Relentlessly

      Curved

      In and out

      Cooling

      But all hanging on to glorious

      Symmetry

      The stars probe your consciousness

      And in the stillness

      You are overawed by the immensity and potential simplicity,

      The huge energies

      Of it all.

      Gradually,

      Drifting away,

      As the eastern horizon lightens.

      The black sky and stars

      Fade and vanish

      And the sun rises.

      Leaving the quarter celestial moon

      Hanging in the sky.

      You are on top of a steep wooded hill

      Contemplating all before you,

      The bush, the sky, the distant ocean.

      The dark wood opens

      And you step off the hill

      Through the thick bush and scrub

      Down to the river bank

      Cluttered with broken trees.

      Air vibrating with the sound

      Of cicadas in the shimmering heat.

      The river sluggish

      Searching its way

      Through the giant red gums.

      You clamber and climb

      Through the river edge chaos

      Hints of the sea on the fitful breeze.

      Opening and easier

      You see the blue sky ahead

      Through ti tree scrub.

      Break out to the sea wind

      Down the sandy bar

      To the noise of waves and water.

      You run to the sea and in.

      The mass of boulders on the shore

      Speaks to you

      Touched by the waves

      Of storms and still seas

      Like the faintest murmur

      A distant echo

      In its time of eons

      I was born from the magma below.

      Cascading down

      Until still and cool.

      Worn away

      Changed to sand

      Scattered

      Moved, buried and squeezed

      Folded and lifted.

      Transformed.

      A new state

      Reborn.

      I age, wear

      And change again and again

      In a constantly repeating

      Cycle of being.

      The darkness rolls back

      And light flows in

      Assaulting you with meaning

      Flooding over you

      Warming you

      Steadying you

      And making you grow.

      As the sky, the sea and the earth tell you

      All things live in constantly repeating

      Cycles of being,

      Birth,