If Ignorance Is Bliss . . .

A site labeled An Atlas of the Universe can be (to the conceptualizing mind) a portal to eventual madness.

For how can one reconcile an individual's quandary over what to prepare for breakfast with the realization that the planet housing human kind is nothing more than the most minuscule force-point of an ion within an unfathomably immense universe? A universe which has existed for many times the number of years that life on Earth has existed and will remain in existence eons after any and all forms of Earth-borne life have been extinguished.

How can mere Man (let alone one single man) remain sane after realizing that the strangely uniform shape of the visible universe from a distance of 14 billion light-years from our sun signals a possible purpose. And after envisioning the possibility of this universe being merely a single particle/wave existing within an incomprehensibly intelligent living entity?

And just imagine that the entity this particle/wave connotes actually communicates with another similar member of a group of even greater entities. And this group being but one of a cascading spiral of other groups within an 'infinity' of groups, each group inhabiting a 'higher' plane, being a Higher Power to the group just below.

Have I reached that point of madness yet?

Sometimes it certainly seems to be so.

How would I ever come to know?

How could I even know?

Why would it matter?

And to whom?

Or to what?

"...?..."

A verse from an 'oldies' song keeps running through my mind and interrupting my thoughts.

Up in a tree so high way up in the sky

Sits a wide eyed monkey on a limb

He wonders why the people go

to so much trouble

Just to try to be like him . . .

The recent earthquake in Chile has dominated the evening news of late.

When I was but a brainless lad studying Spanish in school, our teacher (Miss Luty) passed out to the class a number of names with addresses of Spanish speaking students in other countries. We were each to take one and to then write to that person, thus becoming a Pen Pal.

I still remember, all these many years later, the name of my Pen Pal: Carmen Galaz Rias, a student studying English in her hometown of Concepcion, Chile.

And I've been wondering . . .

"Did she survive to the present day, and if so does she still live in Concepcion, the epicenter of the quake?"

No man is an island, entire of itself...
--John Donne