There are days that appear to start out ordinary, and then something extraordinary happens. It starts with an invitation from a friend to go hear a speaker at a fundraiser brunch. The speaker is unknown to you, but you trust this friend and accept the invite, leaving behind eight squirrely children on a day off from school with your mother, who has arrived from out of town just in time to help keep peace flowing. “This better be good,” you think as you look out the rearview mirror. And so you drive away, cell phone on vibrate just in case, and enter another sphere. Your “mother hat” has been tucked away neatly in your purse for a few short hours, allowing you to fully become engaged in the presentation. You are quickly captivated by the speaker’s explanation of the new universe – the one understood in these times based on past and current scientific evidence. You sit motionless as one scientific fact after another blows your mind. It’s not all new. You’ve heard before how the flutter of a butterfly wing on one side of the world can affect the weather patterns on the other side. That knowledge of connectedness isn’t novel, but today, you find it extraordinarily amazing, especially as you consider that those of us living today came from a source set into motion roughly 13 billion years ago. It was around then that the universe came into being and began its constant, rapid expansion, away and outward, not at all static. The speaker explains a very complex scenario in terms you can understand, putting you in touch with the tremendous significance of each person who walks the earth. “Each of us is the universe come to consciousness,” she says, and you think, Wow, because you are wowed. “There is no separateness,” she adds. I knew it! And then it hits you, that profound thought that was building, and you realize that not only your life but the lives of your children have been in motion for 13 billion years. And you wonder how anyone could question the significance of a parent’s work and mission. In that role, after all, you and all the other parents alive today are helping to mold beings whose existence has been unfolding for 13 billion years (there’s that number again). In other words, your children have been on a journey that long, moving toward this very time and place as you have been, and you have a chance to help form them into positive forces that might make a difference in how the world evolves. Charged with these thoughts, you and your friend excitedly discuss the information as it relates to your lives, and you bounce out of the talk remembering, as the speaker said, “We are not here and the universe ‘out there.’ We are in and part of the universe.” Of course, you think, but wow. And you go back home to your little bundles of space and matter, those little beings so intricately connected to you, and you try to keep that feeling of radical amazement nearby as you kiss a wound and set plans for the rest of the day, and you can’t help but think, ‘Not mundane after all, this life I live.’
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