Belong

I could have sworn I didn’t want to get up this morning when Blue came in and licked my face. How in the world he pushed both doors open I don’t know, and why he’d never thought to do it before, I don’t know. I only know that I was very tired from getting up early yesterday to go to the Farmer’s Market and tired from baking bread all day the day before. I’d hoped to sleep late or sleep in as they call it now. But I know me and when I’m waked at waking time there’s no going back. I’d seen daylight through the blinds and Big Blue the hunting dog and Little Gertie the terrier were ready to be fed and the world was waiting for me to come and see.

 I fixed my coffee and just happened on my way to the porch to catch a glimpse of an old book Billy bought years ago, before we even married. It’s called The Hand of God.


 The book is a collection of photographs from the Hubble Spacecraft with quotes from famous writers and philosophers beside each picture. Down in the corner of each page in tiny print is an actual description of the photograph. The descriptions of the photographs were much more profound to me than anything the philosophers had to say so I would have put their quotes in tiny print and description of the picture in the big print. Descriptions like this: “this photograph to your left is of two galaxies 1000 light years away and 150 light years across in size that will collide a billion years from now.” That’s a quote worth putting in bold letters in my opinion .

 This morning on my porch is still and quiet. A squirrel just broke the silence by jumping onto the limb of my neighbor's dogwood tree, making what sounded like a splash onto the now dry late summer leaves. The doves are calling each other, the redbirds clicking and the truck in my neighbor's driveway just cranked, they’re no doubt taking their dogs to the park for a walk. And I wonder in this silence this Sunday morning what it must be like to fly out into this universe and float among the galaxies and nebula and supernova and watch and listen to all these explosions of universes larger than I can imagine colliding, beginning, ending, fading, birthing, living, dying. I wonder what’s going on out there, all this creation and expansion and energy.

 I’m not one of those people who believe there has to be life out there simply because the universe is so vast, in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we humans are the apex, the consciousness the awareness that sees, and that we are the culmination of this project and whatever created all this is waiting on us to come into all we were meant to be. I mean why not? If you go in the other direction it seems just as vast, studying molecules and atoms and quarks and whatever other invisible particles there are. That too, seems infinite on a smallness scale. But I have to say, this morning, looking at those beautiful pictures of stars and galaxies and reading the quotes:




  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.


 Albert Einstien

I have to wonder about this book. It’s been in the house for years and I never even looked at it, but this morning the book called me. As for why I feel like crying when I behold the heavens, as for why I have such a bond, remembering the dark nights of my soul some years back, going out onto my front porch when I was living out in the country and staring for long periods of time at the sky, where no street lights or vapor lights could block or obliterate the view, when I was at my worst and the darkness of my soul was at its blackest staring into the sky at millions of twinkling stars and hearing God’s voice, always saying the same mysterious word to me, the word that even now I understand and I don’t understand, “belong,” God said to me, “belong.”

 And I wondered what in the world that word could have meant a year later when the porch on which I’d been sitting at night staring at the stars was hooked by a chain to a fire truck and pulled away from the rest of the house simply to keep it from burning into the night, and the crash the thunderous crash as it came to the ground exposing the violent flames that were consuming my home of 25 years. I wondered in that moment what in the world God was talking about when he’d said “belong.”

 I’d thought he’d meant belong to this home, this house, this place and now it was on fire. But I held on to it, the word, but wondered again three years later when the marriage, the 28 year marriage with four children dissolved, sadly, bitterly before our very eyes and I wondered about the night sky and the one word of comfort I could actually hear from it, “belong.” It’s seemed that everything I was trying to belong to was disappearing.

 But now, nearly a decade later I have a different husband, a different porch, a different home, but the sky is the same and I’m learning little by little to belong to this, what is, what will never burn or dissolve or fail. To belong to the invisible, the mysterious, the being, the isness of life. And there is peace in that to know this. At last, finally, I belong.