By E. Alan Meece, aka Eric Meece
March 4th, 2024, for UUFLG Band of Writers, March 10, 2024
My UU Band of Writers
prompt: on the edge
A river reaches the edge of a cliff and falls over. It’s a beautiful sight to us, but how does the water feel as it falls and hits the bottom? How would we feel if we were riding a raft on this river and went over the edge?
The edge itself is a two-edged sword, and I am of two minds about it. I watch myself breathe. Air flows in and out. Is it ever on the edge of being in or out? How about what we eat, drink and excrete? How about all the sights and sounds that come into us through our senses, and the education, the ideas, the language and culture, the music, the news, and all of this that we also give out? Where is the edge? Everything is inside me, and I am in everything. And yet I feel like an organized entity that brings it all in and gives it all out. Unless there are many beings, there’s no unity among them all, and vice versa. Even as I breathe in, the world sucks air out of me too. D.T. Suzuki related the Zen paradox that necessity is freedom and freedom is necessity. It almost sounds like Orwell’s 1984. But Suzuki didn’t say freedom is slavery.
Our solar system provides two great symbols for us to contemplate this paradox. The Moon is an image of the Sun that’s easier to look at. It’s like a dark after-image of the Sun we might see after we look at the Sun for a second. The Sun is our great God and Lord; we must bow down before Him and we dare not look him in the eye. But the Moon can do this for us because She is the same size as the Sun as we see Him. The Moon is like the Christ, God in human form whom we can meet and touch. And the Holy Spirit is both together, the ever-giving Sun and the ever-receiving Moon, and doing both together is Life. And the proportions of 108 or 108+ make this possible, and also our unique relationship to Venus, the planet of love that moves with the Earth and Sun in a 5-petal figure with 108-degree angles, like a face of a dodecahedron. And there’s more, of course. Recently discovered and demoted Pluto with its totally-gravity-entangled Moon is the two-in-one paradoxical planet that is not a planet that nevertheless charts the rise and fall of civilizations and revolutions in its cycles.
And it charts this for us now, because as President Biden says, "we are at an inflection point that will determine everything that comes after". We are on the edge. We will decide soon between freedom and slavery, between prosperity and inequality, between involvement in the world or isolation, between human rights and genocide, between a liveable world and a dark age.
Time is continuous. We change, and we stay the same. Yesterday is still a part of me, and yet I am different. We are on the edge of disaster or a promised land; but where is the edge? We can’t pin it down. We’ll have to flow into tomorrow, swim the river and ride the waterfall. THEN we’ll see a rainbow, and like all rainbows it has definite layers in 7 colors, and yet they shade into each other. And how does it form a bow, I ask at BOW? It is our gateway arch to a new world. It appears in a different location to each observer, and yet we all see it. It has 3 ingredients: light like the Sun, water like the Moon and its tides, and we its observers who are Life and Spirit. We can’t walk through this arch, but it’s already inside us because it’s visible. So also is the new world we are entering now already inside us, as we stand poised on the edge of it. Somehow, the planets and the spirits will guide us as we fall, and the rainbow will appear in the mist in the water as we reach toward the calm pool below.
The Rainbow Bridge by E. Alan Meece
Mother Earth and Rebirth by E. Alan Meece
Heroic Work of Alchemy poem by E. Alan Meece
Inscrutible Alchemy by E. Alan Meece
The Edge Manifesto description of short book by Ron Lampi
Biden speaks on democracy and the inflection point in Sept.2022