Space, The Final Frontier

Oddly, I seem to be among a very small minority of pagans who can reconcile my religious beliefs with science. I wonder about this. I have come across so many pagan types who apparently think they cannot practice their religion and their craft and still study and be curious about other things. People who want to discuss and learn about absolutely nothing but their chosen path, and I think they are missing the whole point of life.

We were given our life to learn lessons, knowledge and wisdom both. And they are different things. While it is important to gain wisdom through our religion and arte, it is also important to live in the world around us.

There are lessons to be learned from interactions with people and other species. With different forms of life. Everything has spirit, and broken down to it's smallest self, everything is alive and moving. On an quantum level, everything hums with constantly moving tiny bits of life. Compassion and strength of character must be learned. We must learn to learn from everything.

As practitioners of Arte and followers of the ancient ones, we hope to receive the gift of wisdom of the full nature of reality. What comes after, so to say, as well as knowledge of and interaction with beings that can transport us to another place and time, another realm of being, and can answer the questions we have of the fullness of being that most people will never see. But we should also be using all of the senses that we have to dive fully into our experiences of this life, for they feed and strengthen our spirit and everything we do tugs at the web of wyrd and affects everything else. I am an animist, I see spirit in everything. While everything may not have the same level of consciousness or awareness, I respect that everything is connected intimately, and without that awareness and respect to the spirit of everything, we kill our spiritual growth and limit ourselves to a dull ignorant existance.

Why is this part of our experience ignored by a large percentage of the pagan community? Why do so many people think they cannot possibly have anything important to learn from anything outside of their particular chosen "path" of religion or craft?

I have an insatiable desire to acquire knowledge, and I find the study of the sciences to be utterly fascinating. Astronomy and the interacting physics and geological studies engage my imagination, and fulfill a need to know about not only the world I live in, but what is all around it. And in Space, I find a delight and awe that sets fire to my mind. Through much study, and it is not easy to wrap your mind around much of what is out there, I find a correlation to my religious beliefs everywhere I look. Because I know how something works, does not take away the sense of the divine and sacredness of everything.

I spend a lot, and I mean a lot, of time studying our earth and how it came to be, and how it works. I spend an equal amount of time if not even more studying space and the wonders that inhabit it, and what it is made of. I theorize, and I think and I let my imagination run wild. There is more in the heavens and in the earth than we can imagine, and there is a symbiotic relationship between everything. Space is filled with what is called the Cosmic Web. It is an interconnectedness that fills the universe. Does this not concur with our idea of wyrd? The interconnectedness of everyone and everything? We and everything else we know of are made of stardust. Literally. The elements that make up everything are formed in stars and through catastrophic violence, eventually released into the universe until they come together in a cosmic dance. The death of a star creates new life. And yet, there is still the question of what actually created the spark of "life", consciousness and spirit. Science does not answer this, my spiritual studies and practice do.

There are so many questions that I want the answer to. And I am delighted with the answers I find. This to me is a part of a life well lived, truly lived. I believe that we are not alone out here. Our little blue planet is precious to us, but there must be so many more. There are billions of suns in our galaxy alone, and billions more galaxies out there. I hear people say they believe the gods came about when we did as humans. I find this utterly ignorant. I believe the gods created everything and they let it play out as it will. This universe is at the very least many billions of years old if you believe the big bang theory. Perhaps eternal if that is what you believe. We as humans, as well as our Earth are not even as old as the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. And yet some have the arrogance to assume we are the top of the food chain, and we created the gods.

I see pictures of the vast forces of chaos, and the order born from it in space and the beauty of them can make me weep. There is so much more in front of our eyes that we need to see, to fully appreciate how special we are, and how special we are not. I follow the life of a star, that lives for eons, planets born from the remnants of the star and the moons born of the remnants of those planets. How those moons affect things gravitationally on their respective planets. What becomes of those planets, does life form? How is this place different from where I live? And some day in a vast and almost unimaginable space of time, the processes that allowed that star to live, slowly grind to a stop, and in a moment of utter force and destruction, the star explodes, and implodes, and from the remnants of that star, the stuff of everything, stardust is thrust out into the universe, to some day reform into new stars and planets and life. And from the implosion of that star, perhaps a thing of complete and utter destruction is created. A monster of unimaginable gravitational force and pull that devours everything around it, even light itself. What becomes of what is pulled into that beast? We do not know, but whatever is yanked into that abyss is torn apart on an atomic level and perhaps becomes energy itself, or infinitesimally tiny bits of matter that travel unseen ...to where? Where does a black hole lead to? Where does what goes in, come out?

Stars cluster in galaxies, galaxies collide and merge, constantly moving. At the center of all galaxies it is believed, is a massive black hole. All galaxies and clusters of stars are connected and part of the cosmic web. Nebulae gleam, the birthplace of galaxies.

And at the farthest reaches of the universe that we are capable of seeing the light from, is the distant, ancient past. Stars are the portals of time travel. When we look up into the night sky, we are looking back in time. What we see, is so far away that it may not even exist anymore, or it may be radically different. As far into the universe as we can see, is close to 14 billion years old, can you imagine? The pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope ...those blurry colorful, brilliant images of billions of galaxies that encompass only a tiny little degree of the night sky, the light we see and the images we see of them is actually what they looked like billions upon billions of years ago. And that is only as far as we can see. We are limited by light speed. The age of things is staggering. And not enough time has passed yet for light from farther reaches to reach us. All of this makes my head spin and makes me burn to learn more.

Space and time are a long graceful dance everywhere we look. Everything in space, pulls on everything else. As it should pull on our imaginations, as it should make us want to learn.

And that is just astronomy. What of the secrets our own earth holds? Much of which we are still clueless about. Yesterday I saw a rock. That rock has been dated to within a couple of hundred thousand years of when earth was created. Back when the surface of the earth was a hot, molten, volcanic, harsh place, where life could not possibly exist in any form. That rock was pulled deep from within the earth, far deeper than we can ever go. Through the force of eruption, that rock came to rest and cooled and for billions of years has sat undiscovered. Inside that rock was water, radically changing how scientists thought water developed on our planet. In the blink of an eye, history changed, minds were set afire. But that is another story =)