Following is a poem I wrote in 1974.
She appeared at the door,
With her children,
To spend the day
Because she had heard me say
That I was lonely.
"Lady, you don't understand.
I am lonely because
The earth is such a small planet
In the universe.
Because 20,000 people died
In the Guatemalan earthquake.
Because I am a middle aged,
Motherless child.
I though everybody felt that way
Sometimes.
Don't you?"
I didn't get to go to church this morning because my son was running in the Disney Marathon and my granddaughter was throwing up and...well...I was needed.
But I'm feeling spiritual and blessed anyway.
I spent a few hours this weekend researching Neil Shubin's new book, The Universe Within...Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People.
Dr. Shubin's big on what we have in common rather than what separates us. Me too. In a nutshell, he says that since the big bang happened, about 3 and a half billion years ago, we've all (meaning rocks, planets and people) had a common history, a shared similarity.
I actually know a couple of folks whom I might describe as having similarities with a bag of rocks, but, as Dr. Shubin says, we all do. Even me. But, like I said, this makes me feel good. Because I lived a lot of my life feeling kind of alone in the universe.
Even though Dr. Shubin is an Evolutionary Biologist, and really, really smart, this book, as far as I can tell, is pretty readable for us regular folks.
He wrote a best seller in 2009 called Your Inner Fish. One of my favorite writers, Oliver Sachs, said of this book "It will change forever how you understand what it means to be human."
I think he's saying we all come from the same source and we're all in this thing together.
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