April 25

The days go by, and so much is so banal: getting things done, watching something stupid on TV. But then there are those moments, where your daughters tell you that you are the best dad ever, or you’re holding them, or making them laugh and it is anything but banal. I’m thinking this morning about something Sofia asked, “How did God form?” Something she said she’d been thinking about for a long time and had a feeling she would be thinking about for a long time to come. I posted this on FB and a rastafarian friend responded that God was energy that had always been here and always would. That makes intuitive sense, but also just makes the head spin faster. How could something just always be? It makes being alive so poignant somehow, the more you think about it. And I’m thinking about it extra hard because I’m listening to an esoteric book, “You Are The Universe,” which talks about many things, including different theories for how the universe formed, and especially how many perfectly precise “accidents” had to occur for us to be here, to form anything at all, to form DNA for instance, and how odd it is that we can reason all of this out. It just leaves you with a sense of awe. Hard to get any housework done when you stop and try to take in eternity. You feel so impossibly small and impossibly large at the same time. Like at some level the universe points to you as a culmination. And sometimes I feel like that, like I’m grooving with everything. But also I’m an idiot who can barely function in life, not to mention infinitesimally small in comparison to this city, let alone the planet and the billions of stars beyond us.

***

One member of my family was complaining about another member of my family, and I’m listening, and I’m wondering if all of this complaining is necessary. Suddenly I remember a line from a Trevor Hall song I heard recently, “Don't you carry stones in your bowl of light.” I like that idea, that any resentment or upset you carry is like carrying stones. But immediately after I had that thought a line from the song I was listening to, the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, jumped out at me... “[there is] a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together.”

Amazing timing. I’m a writer, so always fitting words together, stitching them into meaning, and it’s hard to ignore the precision of the timing of these words in a moment like this. I’m having a thought that is a judgment, “this person is complaining and these complaints are like carrying stones.” And the radio immediately answers me with, “there’s a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together.” I’d never even considered these lyrics before. What the hell does casting away stones and gathering them together even mean? But now here they were, a clear and direct response to my thoughts: don’t judge the complainer. Maybe it’s time to gather these stones together? Maybe it’s time to do something about the problem?

It’s a good example of how quick witted and full of wisdom the universe can be if you are listening.