It’s a whole sea of salt and there’s a whole sea of amateur and professional photographers who have come to capture it: massive, white, flat, and barren, it’s an awe-some sight. And then there’s me, crouched in the dune on the margins, trying to get the petals of one tiny flower in focus so that I can try to begin to express its beauty, because this is what fills me with awe: life, here, in this place so caustic and hostile that there shouldn’t be any, yet here it is, making its way, life that will find a way wherever and whenever it can, toeing right up to the line that will kill it.
That little flower is indomitable, hardy, persistent. It gives me that spilling over feeling of ultimate humility, that rise in my abdomen, the zing in my throat. A need to share the power of this little thing that is nevertheless more resilient than I surviving, thriving in its way in its environment. Evolution is a gorgeous thing and adaptation the only lesson: things will change because they must, and if not this plant, then another will eventually manage a little better. And they dance on each others’ scale, a push and pull of change and response.
That we should want eternal life as this organism is absurd. The world would change anyways and leave us out of phase, a creature of a fractured multiverse. Life is in the daisy chain from one form and expression to the next. Life is a sentence, a Faulknerian sentence, a continuous utterance nested and subordinated and speaking itself into new meaning at each manifestation of sound.
Life is the dandelion in the sidewalk crack that shrivels under a spray of Round-Up and then shoots up a new stalk next day, the lichen on the headstone, the bacterial bloom in the holding tank. It is tiny and mighty and everywhere. The sublime is underfoot.
Life will out. That is my spirituality, the miracle; I need no other gods to marvel at.
Life in the Multiverse 