I remember seeing my first petroglyph in Wyoming, and I just had to sit and be silent for awhile. We humans have such a yearning to be remembered, so we build pyramids that will eventually crumble--and long ago we painted our hands to mark a wall. Robinson Jeffers wrote the following poem, titled "Hands":


Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight,
a cloud of men's palms, no more,
No other picture.
There's no one to say
Whether the brown shy quiet people who are
dead intended
Religion or magic,
or made their tracings
In the idleness of art;
but over the division of
the years these careful
Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
Saying: "Look: we also were human; we had
hands, not paws. All hail
You cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her
beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human."

This is the labyrinth I built in my backyard over the past 2 summers--with MUCH thanks to my youngest son Richard for doing the math and spray painting the design for me. I dug it by hand, using pavers since I'm a wimp and can't lift very much.

This is a seven-circuit, or classic, labyrinth; it is NOT a maze, since there is only one way in and one way out. Labyrinths are a form of walking meditation. My brother Pete, an Episcopal priest in Seattle, introduced me to them, and I walk mine every day. I've chosen certain topics for contemplation on each circuit--mostly friends and family, with the outer circuit being reserved for the planet.

This is the way I've tried to retain a sense of spirituality outside of the realm of organized religion. I have to agree with Albert Einstein, who once said:

"I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I -- nor would I want to -- conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world...."

This picture of the Horsehead Galaxy is one of my favorites; I used to ask my students to ponder the following data:

• 
  At the equator, the earth spins at 1000 mph.
• 
  The earth revolves around the sun at 18 miles per second.
• 
  The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
• 
  186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a light year
• 
  The sun is 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is 80,000 to 120,000 light years across.
• 
  The closest star is Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light years away. If our sun were scaled down to the size of a period on a printed page, then the distance to Alpha Centauri would be about 8 miles away.
• 
  It takes our solar system 200-250 million years to orbit once around the Milky Way at 155 miles per second.
• 
  The Local Group is the cluster of galaxies to which we belong. It is a group of about 30 galaxies that is about 5 million light-years across. Within the Local Group, the Milky Way Galaxy is moving about 185 miles per second.

The students would just let their minds be blown for awhile--and then move on, as we all must. However, far from making our tiny lives seem meaningless, the idea that we participate in this cosmic dance is amazing. Timothy Ferris is one of my favorite astronomers; in THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE he says:

What is there about the human mind that so resonates with the rest of the universe that we’re able to understand anything about workings of nature on the larger scale? Every scrap of matter and energy in our blood and bones and in the synapses of our thoughts can trace its lineage back to the origin of the universe…. As the Koran puts it, the universe is as close as the veins of our necks. The evolution of the universe goes on not just around us but within us. Our thoughts and feelings, after all, are part of the universe, too, and its story is our story as well.

Finally! After the terrible heat in the Midwest, the rains came yesterday--and I just took a walk and let them drench me! Thomas Merton, Catholic priest and philosopher, had this to say about the rain (excerpt from Rain and the Rhinoceros, Merton's essay while he sat in the rain and read Eugene Ionesco's play RHINOCEROS).

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize....Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water....What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself....Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.