My toe hurt.
It had been giving me a fit for at least two weeks, so I thought I’d best have it looked at before I left for a winter holiday in Puerto Rico. I went to the doctor. He examined my toe, twisted and plied it, tugged at it and popped it with a finger. My perverse toe simply would not hurt. It was like bringing a malfunctioning car to the garage for repairs, and while explaining the problem to the mechanic, the car runs like new.
“Come back if it hurts again,” he said.
All was not lost. While in the waiting room I saw a copy of Scientific American. It was a special addition honoring the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s epic contributions to cosmology. Although scientifically and mathematically challenged, I became intrigued enough to ask the doctor if I might keep the copy. He kindly obliged me. I felt like the child seeing the pediatrician who gets a lollipop after the visit.
In Puerto Rico near where I stay there’s a small bluff overlooking the Caribbean. It’s the center of my universe when I’m here on holiday. It’s a transformative place for me. I bring a chair, sit, and watch the ocean while I read or just think. I brought the copy of Scientific American with me to the bluff.
As a child, vacationing in Maine, I loved sitting on the boulders at the Pemaquid Point Light watching as the surf pounded the rocks. The heaving of the sea had a rhythmic quality and soon my mind went pleasingly blank as the waves came and went, creating a somnambulant state of which I remained aware enough to know I did not want to surrender its spell.
Here too, on the bluff in Puerto Rico, the waves rolled and spent themselves on the beach. Then as if waves were phoenixes made from water, when the old waves crashed and were spent, new ones rose from their remains. It was all about motion, constant motion. Some waves set this way and others that way, driven by the wind while directed by the contours of the earth beneath them. Endless motion, its rising and falling, setting a mood that I have always found spellbinding. At such times I feel in tune with the world.
I read how Einstein’s epic theory of general relativity, had a flaw. He could not see it. It concerned motion, the motion of the universe.
Until 1927, Einstein’s theory of relativity was almost universally accepted. Then, a Belgian scientist proposed that the universe was expanding rapidly, contrary to Einstein’s conviction that the universe was static and its laws behaved the same everywhere.
“Abominable,” Einstein suggested about the Belgian’s claim. Sufficient evidence was eventually martialed that Einstein finally acknowledged his error. The demonstrable motion of the galaxies “has smashed my old construction like a hammer blow.” He was crushed. What arose from the braking wave of Einstein’s construction was the theory of the big bang as perceived through eyes of quantum theorists. Another wrinkle, beside Einstein’s appeared in the cosmic fabric.
I suppose Einstein may have felt as Galileo did when the church challenged his heliocentric theory – sun as the center of our galaxy. However, the church, unlike Galileo or Einstein, when it’s concerned for control rather than truth, remains intransigent in the face of overwhelming evidence. Institutional religion has a reputation for resisting new ideas – exhibiting a lack of imagination – like failing to see the humane merits to both children and parents of practicing birth control or that women are excellent candidates to become priests and bishops. There’s a cosmic law that’s operative in religious matters: It’s known as “We’ve always done it this way.”
I sat relishing the briny scent of salt air, the wind’s cool caress and as my mind wandered aimlessly, I looked down. My toe, happily, had remained staunchly perverse and hasn’t hurt since my doctor’s visit. I wiggled it to be sure.
Then, nearby, I saw a gnarled rounded shell, about the size of a quarter and bleached white as shells become when gulls have eaten the contents and thrown away the containers.
This shell began to rise from the ground about an inch, as if being elevated by some invisible force and for a moment I was spooked. It moved my way and then I saw the legs of a crab walking their unsteady gate, doing what all life enjoys, just getting around, being on the move. Not life in the fast lane, certainly, but life, nonetheless.
Flux, not stasis, is the name of the cosmic game. This is where the glory of the heavens shines through, and in the grand and subtle motions of the earth, the stars, the sea and the millions of creatures that go about their business unseen.
Among the exciting questions this expanding universe raises, the poet T.S. Eliot offers this look at the cosmos. The greater mystery, he suggests, cannot be apprehended except where motion stops. I think he means our motion.
“Except for the point, the still point,
there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
I take that to mean, at least for me, that the wonder of my expanding universe is best apprehended in the stillness of wonder and the quiet of contemplation. I can see the dance more vividly when I take my place at the still point on the bluff in the Caribbean or on the boulders of Main’s rocky shore. Of course I leave my cell phone behind, so I can be sure to be fully available to behold the dance of eternity unfolding right in front of my eyes.
A long way from a sore toe, admittedly, but as quantum mechanics would have it, the possibilities of just how things finally work out are unpredictable.
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