Tag: Moon

It’s Not Obvious

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry7 Comments

it’s not obvious
that the stars aren’t revolving around me
it’s not obvious that I’m the one
who’s actually moving
even when I’m sitting here
there is no disproving.
and you’re moving too

it’s not obvious
that I’m not static
as life evolves around me
that time’s dissolving into me
that I too am just another object
subject to vast forces
shaping me at some point
in a universal scaffold.
that is shaping itself

it’s not obvious
that my life isn’t planned
that it isn’t canned
how is it not a map
when there is seemingly no event
in my life that didn’t depend
on an amazing number of
low probability occurrences
subject to the subtlest
of disturbances
making each moment a miracle
in a myriad of possible timelines

I want things to be clearer
maybe hold things nearer
I’m happy and willing
to be the first one
to try and really look at themselves
in the mirror

why is it when one person has a bad day
he’s able to tuck it away
another wants to do good to compensate
and yet another spits bile
and hate
is it all just too late?
or did we never really stand a chance?

because it should be all a
little easier to follow
but there are sharp turns
and hard truths to swallow
with little time to wallow
so if I say
that I want to sit here
and pretend that the stars are going by
and that the moon is smiling
beaming
radiating not reflecting
and that
I like it that way
because it makes beautiful poetry

then
let me

because it’s not obvious to me
that that’s a bad idea

Nature Private Eye: The Tarp Mulligan Chronicles

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry1 Comment

Episode 1

No sooner had I sat down at my desk. Maria buzzed me. I was feelin’ shot. I just came back from staking out the moon and sun. My first all-nighter since college. Worst year of my life. The Earth had approached a couple of days ago. The broad was in a panic. I knew enough to just shut up and listen. She thought the moon and the sun were having an affair.

I never saw the moon, and around 1 pm, I see something passing in front of the sun, but never got a look at her face. All I got were burger wrappers in my car and a possible burned retina in right eye.

I told Maria to let her in. I needed the work and maybe it was a client. She walked in and even with my 1.5 eyes I could tell she was the most beautiful dame I ever laid eyes on. She said her name was Fiona, she was an astronomer and I could tell from the way she was holding her telescope she was kinky. But when you see a face this serious, you know it ain’t the right time to ask her if you can widen her aperture. She tells me, “I was just mindin’ my own business y’know, looking out my telescope here, just during my lunch break. I saw everything. The moon, the sun. She saw his corona.”

I told the dame we better go tell the Earth together. It was a lie. I could’ve told the Earth myself, but I wanted to dance slow with her, without any music, and have her keep an eye on the stars while I got some shut-eye.

Before Dark

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry8 Comments

She is not sure
if there are others of her kind
She imagines there must be

looking ahead She sees
the atmospheric window open up
the Earth is enjoying a cool evening

She strides with the
turning Earth
sometimes a little faster
sometimes a little slower
Her cape is midnight blue
it shimmers soft
in particles of light
cheating over the horizon

majestic and grim is Her face
proud, lonely
duty-bound

I walk with Her
and She tells me
I don’t owe anything
to the sky anymore
there are going to be stars
and likely a moon
but nobody is watching

it can be time for lingering looks
for dancing with bodies
loose as the wind
a time for kisses
that last too long
no reason for regrets
and then the peace of sleep

but if you don’t want that
She doesn’t judge

when I can no longer
keep pace with Her
She says
the night forgives
and Lady Dusk
pulls the dark night
like a blanket over
my head

The Magic Eye

On By Swarn GillIn Musings, Philosophy12 Comments

I wear an Eye of Horus around my neck.  While not uncommon it may seem strange to those who know me as a fairly outspoken atheist.  Unfortunately my reason for wearing it is not what most people would think.  It is only because I am a big Alan Parsons Project fan and the symbol appears on their most well known album Eye in the Sky.  lol

But in searching for that symbol, which I had no idea what it is called I came across the story of it.  Recently in reading one of a fellow blogger’s post, spouting some theist rhetoric equating faith as being a plausible substitute where uncertainty exists, it reminded of the story of the Eye of Horus.

Long story short, the myth involves Horus and Set (in some accounts are brothers, in some  nephew and uncle respectively).  Set kills Osiris (Horus’ father) and in revenge Horus kills Set, but in that battle Horus is injured.  Set struck at the eye of Horus shattering it.  As luck would have it the eye is broken into a fun set of mathematically progressive pieces.  The symbol of the Eye of Horus is drawn with 6 strokes, each stroke represents what they believed were the 6 senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and thought.  This shattered eye is broken into 6 pieces in specific proportions: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64.  Horus took the pieces of his eye to a local magician to reassemble the eye, but if you do the math, you will of course discover that you are 1/64th short of a whole eye.  This magician had to use ‘magic’ to fill in what was missing.  This was the left eye of Horus, which represents the moon, and is why the moon is supposedly more mysterious (because part of the eye was reconstructed with magic).  The right eye of Horus represents the sun, and this became the more common eye used later in Egyptian culture as a symbol of protection.

Anyway, where I am going with all this is that it seems to me that our human uncomfortability with uncertainty is what drives us to put faith into the missing picture.  You have something that is a whole, you only understand a part of it, and the other part you fill in with faith, instead of remaining uncertain.  This seems hardly surprising to me.  What it does feel like to me is that as we learn more about any particular thing the proportion of what we don’t know gets smaller and smaller.  The God of the Gaps has less of a Gap to cover, and yet we want to give that magic the same level of  importance.  We can go from no idea of our origin, to a very substantial set of empirical evidence about evolution, but no matter  how little uncertainty remains it seems magic must still prevail as long as any proportion still remains.

I think there could be beauty in the things we come up with to explain the unexplainable, but it’s perhaps the dogmatism that concerns me the most.  The inability to be cognizant of the fact that in that space of uncertainty there are many types of magic we could conjure up to fill in that gap, none being more valid than the other.  And yet different religions will try to tell you their magic is better than yours.  In the end, being comfortable with uncertainty seems the more important goal, because it in no way prevents you from enjoying a good story.  I rather like the story of the Eye of Horus. 🙂

Night Conversation

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry, Stories20 Comments

I conversed with a heavenly body last night,
She was particularly beautiful,
She radiated tenderly on my face,
I knew she belonged to another, a great man,
But she was so lovely and alone that I stayed

Of late I had given in to her many times,
I knew he would not mind,
He being so far above us anyway,
And I could not resist her flattery,
And the way her faces expressed sympathy.

With heavy eyes she looked at me and said,
“You are too much in my light friend,
Find your way into the day,
I have been romanced since days of old,
And your companionship is unnecessary.”

Confused and yet boldly replying,
“You may be invisible without him,
But don’t dismiss me so easily,
I do understand you the best lady,
We are much closer than you are with him.”

I paused and pondered in reflection,
“Please see me as I am fair lady,
Though you radiate with less intensity,
You can illuminate me and more,”
But she shook her head in revolution.

I turned away from her rejected,
Feeling her pale light, my desperation waxed
“But lady I am going through a phase,
I know that’s your expertise,
Please let me stay in your company.”

She said, “For as much as we share,
In the end only one face remains,
Your perception of me is as he desires,
Instead, strive to be like him always,
Cast your own light into the universe.”

I said, “You underestimate your value,
But perhaps I do as well,
And alas we are once more alike,
Don’t shut me out from your gifts,
Let me bask in ambiguous beauty.”

I then searched the source of my thoughts,
My lamentations were in orbit,
Do I choose fruitless pursuit in my sky?
My separation from her dawned on me,
But I continued to argue in circles as she circled.

“Why have I never seen you from behind?”
As I turned, her turn kept pace with mine,
“I only see your face changing,
I long to see the curve of your back,
The flowing of your lustrous hair.”

Though she knew the reasons for my pleas
Tears fell from both eyes and she said,
“My motion is fixed and I have no choices,
You do not know the gravity of my situation,
If I was different it was so long ago.”

“You must understand that he is the only one,
The only one who sees all of me,
Though your heart may sink at this,
I am not here for your benefit,
He and I have been together for so long.”

A fog then began to grow in the night air,
She became featureless but glowing,
And I heard her anguish over me,
I felt her obstinance waning,
And I longed to press my face to hers.

She sighed “Only one knows me entire,
And long familiarity has faded to habit,
So expert is my illusion I am whole,
Few show interest in more of me,
I am complimented, but you know the truth.”

“It has been a long time for me too,
Since one has appreciated my other side,
My memory is as clear as yours,
What good is it to rise as he does,
For all my beauty I am shallowly perceived.”

With empathy she resigned and said,
“Let us pass the nights together my darling,
When you are ready to take me from your sky,
You will rise one morning with him,And the thrill of a new day will set you free.”

I conversed with a heavenly body last night,
And as I fell asleep she was there,
And when I opened my eyes I was dreaming,
Dreaming of the warmth of the sun,
When the dream ended, I waited again for her.

 

Out Under The Sky

On By Swarn GillIn Musings, Philosophy, Prose and Poetry, Science17 Comments
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

A friend of mine and I had a wonderful discussion about magic and perfection the other day. It got me thinking about what it means to appreciate the magic something.  For her it was about the pure and the simple.  On a wonderful little gift she gave me, the tag on the gift had the line from the following Walt Whitman poem above “from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars”.  When I looked up the entire poem and read the words (as I had never read it before) I found it funny how much the meaning of the poem had to do with what I was sorting through in my mind (by the way this friend was a student in my Introduction to Earth Science class and wonder if there isn’t more of a message in there for me lol).  The words from the poem she shared with me are good advice.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could no longer follow such advice.  Have I lost something?  Have I lost the appreciation for magic?  Am I unable to enjoy things in perfect silence?  My mind singular on the beauty I behold?  Not too long ago another blogger I follow who writes poetry that I always connect with wrote a poem about missing when life was simple called Old Happy Stars.  I do long for that.  I think we all do to a certain degree.  I also know that you can’t go back and making things feel so simple an amazing is very hard for me.

This discussion about magic came up because we were discussing Santa Claus. She was a firm believer in Santa Claus until the 4th grade, and is raising her daughter, like many people, to see all the magic that is Santa Claus.  I am someone who never once believed in Santa Claus, and thus even I were to want to give my son Santa Claus at Christmas there would be no level where I could really fake it.  I have no memories of any magic associated with Santa.  She said it’s important for children to have those magical things.  And I have to say I agree with her.  After the conversation I started to ponder what the magic was in my childhood.  I remember looking at lightning in thunderstorms and feel that it was absolutely magical.  Thunder seemed magical, the smell of rain seemed magical.  For me there was a lot of magic in the sky and I am certain I had some moments of perfect silence, even if it wasn’t actually silent.  I think sometimes in such moments we feel perfect silence because we are in perfect solitude, shutting out the rest of the world while we are singular in our focus.  When I came home I started watching my son and how amazed he is by things, whether it’s trains or the planes up in the sky.  It seems to me that even they begin to learn what these things are and what their purpose might be, they have no idea how they work.  Something that seems to moving but has no muscles, no animal-like locomotion, no feathers for flying must seem like absolute magic.  If I wasn’t forming a lot of long term memories, and I saw this metal object flying in the sky I would be pointing up every single time too in excitement.  I think, at least I hope, kids always see things as magical, even if you don’t give them Santa.  For them, every object that they’ve dropped or thrown up in the air comes down.  That plane up in the sky has to be some pretty crazy stuff to them, and what other choice do they have but to take it on faith that it will not fall down from the sky.

That thought made me happy, but I started to get a little bit sad, because I am not sure that I could just gaze at the stars in perfect silence. Because in that poem I am the Learn’d Astronomer, and if I was a student in that class I would be enthralled by the equations, the figures, and the charts.  When I look at the stars I can’t help but think what the humidity might be that is impacting their twinkle.  I would think about how far away those stars are, and how trigonometry gives us a way of telling how far away they are through stellar parallax.  I would think about how the stars are like a portal back in time, knowing that I am seeing what a star looked like 10,000 years ago, and how at that time human civilization was just dawning.   If you can’t tell already, it’s hard to quiet my mind.  I look at everything like that.  Sometimes I am wondering and questioning, maybe coming up with some hypothesis to explain what I’m seeing.  Perhaps I would make an analogy.  Or perhaps I would simply think about all the forces at work, or the history of the object, the big picture, the detailed picture, related pictures.  Sometimes I contemplate all the connections that one thing has to others.  All that comes to me in a flood and I feel overwhelmed by how amazing this universe is.  And then I started to smile, because maybe it’s not magic, but it’s still amazing.  It’s still beautiful.  I t still leaves me in awe and wonder even if I know exactly how it works and think about every variable in the equation.  And maybe for every person that walks out on the Learn’d Astronomer and enjoys that perfect silence at the stars, there is a student who stays and listens and just takes it all in and the amount of seemingly simultaneous thoughts grow like the branches of a tree.  And I’m not making a comment about level of intelligence because my friend is extremely intelligent and I feel like she experiences those moments of perfect silence frequently, perhaps even at will when she needs to.  But maybe it’s just really a different way of approaching the same beauty in life.  There are truly times when I wish I could experience such moments that Whitman describes, and so I envy her.   But maybe the beauty I see is just as enviable.

So as I began to smile I thought back to just that morning and how when I drove in to work just sliver of the crescent moon was visible as the moon waned. Often, at about an hour before sunrise, there is enough reflection of the Earth back to the moon and you can see the rest of the lunar sphere, even though it’s featureless.  Then I thought in my mind about the geometry of all 3 objects and had this model in my head.  And I decided to write a poem.  The one I just posted a few days ago.  And like magic I took all those thoughts and imagined almost like a love affair between the Earth and the moon.  So even if I stare at the moon and explain its beauty while also appreciating it, such thoughts can still inspire, still create, and still bring me a great deal of wonder that I think can be considered a type of magic.  And maybe that Learn’d Astronomer is just as lost in his world of equations and charts as the star gazer is lost in his moment of perfect silence.  Maybe it’s not so important how you experience magic in the world, but that you do experience it and never lose that ability to get lost in wonder and awe at beauty.

The Slender Moon

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry, Science8 Comments

As the night kissed the dawn,
You revealed to me only a thin,
Beaming sliver of shining light,
But from me you could not hide,
You were whole in my reflection,
As I faced you with bright smile,
I introduced you to the day,
But you paled at the rising sun,
I turned away and you were gone,
Wishing there was a way to go back.

But I still remember that light,
I still remember all of you,
I patiently wait for night,
And hope it all begins anew.