Things I wonder now.

This image messed me up.

This image is called Webb’s First Deep Field. This photo was first presented to the public by President Joe Biden on July 11, 2023 at a White House event. This infrared image was produced by the James Webb Space Telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Here’s what messed me up:

According to NASA:

Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand
held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe.

AND

According to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium:

Each of these dots is a galaxy.

Huh.

I have been to the beach. A grain of sand is very small. Tiny, really.

And all of these galaxies are imaged on that grain of sand. Held at arm’s length.

Whoa.

My stupid little 50 years or so in the vastness of the universe is not. significant. at. tall.

At first it was liberating to know this.

A slice of cake or fruit for dessert? *thinks about the First Deep Field * A sample of all of your desserts, please.

But then…but then… the existential questions emerged:

Why am I even here? And why do I have the ability to
think things through and know about my mortality if
I can’t do anything about it? What’s that about?

What do pastors who know about this think about this,
in terms of the existence of God?

What if there is life on Mars but we keep running it over
with the Rover because our view of what life is
is not universal (in the truest sense of that word)?

And then I began to think…

According to the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information, humans emanate light. We glow. Did you know that?

By using a sensitive charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera
with the ability to detect light at the level of a single photon,
we succeeded in imaging the spontaneous photon emission from human bodies.

So, what if the living of my life is information that is coded in the light that emanates from me and is information for other beings from other places to read, like a book?

What if how I live my life—my thoughts, words, and deeds—can inform other beings about how humans can be?

What if living my truest and most content life until I take my last breath is the way to help others live their best existences? Maybe that’s why I have the ability to think—it gives me the ability to choose…and to choose to do exactly that.

And what if dying really is a reunion with the Light—the you that is You is shedding this temporary form and re-merging with Light that’s traveling at, well, its speed, and your consciousness (because that’s all that remains) is off to another adventure in a different galaxy where you try on that body and have those experiences there? What if that’s what reincarnation is—that you get to choose to jump back in here on Earth or in a different galaxy or whatever?

I wonder all these things now.