- The Orion Nebula
Tolstoy was right. There is only indifference in the stars. As they burst us into firestorm, there was no knowledge of doing so. The universe cares not what becomes of us as it carves its reality out in realms we will never touch or know. But we don’t live only in the universe or only as part of that universe. We live in realms of our own discovery and creation for we live in relationship with one another, with ourselves, with our world, with the cosmos. WE live in relationship with our planet whether it knows it or not. WE live in relationship with the cosmos whether it knows it or not. The indifference of the cosmos on the grandest scale should not impose its indifference upon us or upon our relationships. Certainly, it can be said that what we do to one another makes no difference to the universe or universes, but what we do to one another makes very much and very real difference to ourselves and to the others with and to whom we do it. It makes a very real difference to this, our home. Our moral landscape is not lived out on the planetary expanses that we can see with our telescopes. It is lived out in our hearts and in our lives and so I believe it is not only appropriate, it
is our responsibility to articulate for ourselves a moral framework that we can con-fuse with the reality of our cosmological framework, a moral truth that we can con-fuse with our cosmological truth, with the heritage of connection that is ours. A moral truth that, con-fused with the amazing cosmological truth (that we are all Africans, all sisters and brothers, all, ultimately, one family), how things matter con-fused with how things are – A NOBLE TRUTH that can take us beyond despair, beyond destruction, beyond the dissolution of all our former, crumbling structures, to hope once again.