Stretch for It

In a tiny span of time, our concept of earth’s place in the cosmos has utterly transformed. Up until 1923 (when Hubble found a ‘variable star’ on a glass plate of Andromeda), the notion of a galaxy did not even exist –the Milky Way was thought to be an island universe. As Maria Popova expressed it on her Marginalia site,“Suddenly, the universe was a garden blooming with galaxies, with ours but a single bloom.” And it was only in 2004 that the Hubble Telescope captured a million-second-long exposure showing us there isn’t just one, or a handful, of other galaxies besides ours, but at least 100 billion galaxies – each containing at least 100 billion stars.

How to stretch for it
How to look up from our little lives
and comprehend the magnitude.
The old ones knew
we were from the stars.
But maybe even they,
the shamans, the seers, the dreamers,
having their babies and tending their people,
getting down and dirty with earthy life,
couldn’t always hold the grandness.
Maybe even they,
when they tried to grasp it all,
sometimes felt fireworks scramble their understanding.

How to stretch for it
How to look up from our little lives
and comprehend the magnitude.
I tried to talk to the first graders about the moon.
How it goes around us and
stays round as a ball
even when it looks like a smile.
Even thinking about the sun
shining on the side of the moon we can’t see
isn’t easy to apprehend or convey.
Trying to sense our whole solar system
being on a tiny edge of the Milky Way,
well, it takes regular practice.
But now, this incomprehensible word:
billion; then, one hundred of those billions.
What? If your brain doesn’t balk
you’re not using it.
Good. That’s the only way.
Not the brain but the whole spacetime suit we live in,
the whole body, with its every antenna.

How to stretch for it
How to look up from our little lives
and comprehend the magnitude.
Those billions of galaxies
where we came from,
where every particle/wave of our bodes came from,
are simply home,
simply stardust home we’re made from.
Earthlings on earth with elsewhere homes as well.
Recognizing home
happens in the body,
more a feeling than a thought.
Relax your brain and open your pores.
At night from your back porch,
open your arms to the stars.
Call home,
like the extraterrestrial you are
Extra, meaning earthling plus.
Double-visioned so you can perceive
the micro and the macro
the seen and the unseen.
Go ahead, you have it in you,
stretch for it!
©Susa Silvermarie 2024