Chiaroscuro

Grocery shopping is an annoying business. No sooner do I lay in all the provisions on this week’s list than I discover that we’ve run out of all those on last week’s list. Everything I lug home gets washed down the drain, chewed-up, thrown-out, lost, or swallowed. It’s a never-ending process, and the worst of it is that it’s not just the groceries: it’s everything.

Everything in this world is in a continual state of transmutation. That’s why I can’t understand all the fuss over recycling. Recycling is a fact of life. There is no trick to it at all.

The real problem is getting anything to remain as it is.

Not that there’s likely any “thing” actually here anyway. Manifest reality is about as substantial as the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland. Fine edges between things disappear when examined closely. A magnifying glass will reveal the edge that seemed so sharp to the naked eye to be really quite rough. And a microscope will reveal that the rough edge is really a broad, vague area of transition, with no clear beginning or end. An electron microscope will reveal canyons and crags where you had imagined only smoothness. At the sub-atomic level even these fade away into tiny particles separated by incredibly vast spaces. Inside the smallest of these particles, finally, there is only space – and timespace “events” that create the illusion of a solid that isn’t really there.

Physicists sound more like theologians than scientists when they attempt to describe the mysteries of these micro worlds-within-worlds. British physicist, Stephen Hawking, has a mathematical model based on String Theory that posits 6 more dimensions than the 4 we’ve been accustomed to think of as the complete set. Imagine that! I can’t, but so far, no one has found a flaw in his calculations. Even the time-space events themselves are unstable. In some circumstances the “events” apparently unfold backward in time. And the physicists tell us in their droll way, that all these “virtual” particles & anti-particles, that act like hard stuff – but aren’t – are held together by “strange attractions” and “charm”.

The Universe seems more unfathomable than we can imagine, let alone, understand.

All things, from quasars to quarks, are not as they seem. Reality is a shadow-show produced by God for reasons only He knows.

Nothing exists but space, time, and countless souls that wend their way between the light that is of God, and the darkness that isn’t.

And still the grocery problem persists.

Maybe I’ve overlooked something.

Mrs. Easley

I Talk to Ghosts