Eternity – Embracing Forever

All posts tagged: Eternity

Choice and Consequence Part 5: Free Will, Learning and Determinism

February 13, 2022

by Michael

Part 4 of the series is here. I listened to a YouTube video this week in which physicist Sean Carroll gave a talk entitled “God Is Not a Good Theory.” In his presentation, Dr. Carroll used Bayesian probabilities to compare the likelihood of God’s existence to the likelihood that we live in a multiverse—(multiverses being one naturalistic way of explaining the appearance of a statistically unlikely universe such as our own). The Bayesian procedure involves […]

The Same, Only Different

June 11, 2017

by Michael

comments 33

What do you think the future will be like, Hafiz? I was thinking about fusion-powered hovercrafts and molecular sequencing technologies that could produce cheeseburgers from a teaspoon of good dirt. Redrawn political borders, bullet trains that crossed the ocean, and ways to download skills and information directly into your brain. I was thinking about teleportation and glass condominiums floating in the clouds. Something you drank that allowed your body to look whatever age you desired. […]

On a Scale of One to Ten

July 26, 2016

by Michael

comments 35

Poetry

We’ll never know what it’s like to exist forever in a condition of perpetually transforming joy and goose-bump inducing discovery if we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility. It does sound pretty out there, but so don’t NASCAR races to German Shepherds. If we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility, we’ll likely take something perfect and beautiful just as it is, something like space exploration or boat building or […]

The Staggering Depth of Silence

February 13, 2016

by Michael

comments 40

Poetry

Eternity sometimes feels like a boundless readiness coiled up and squashed into every point there is, like a swoop of clowns hidden inside a mote of pixie dust that’s hovering in the air just a foot or two in front of your left eye, all of them banging on the glass and reciting plays and brewing antidotes and tuning chainsaws and singing scales and lighting firecrackers and twitching with anticipation in there, just waiting on […]

Rising Seas

September 3, 2015

by Michael

comments 47

Christ

Something is happening but I can’t see what it is, because the day sky is an impenetrable scattering of color, and the night sky is too deep to see the bottom. The moon isn’t a reliable reference either, because it’s just one point, and clearly an outlier. You can’t leverage it at all. Though the particulars are being worked out, I still take comfort in this vague arrival– in its presence– whatever it is. I […]

Begging For Real

July 26, 2015

by Michael

comments 37

Poetry

One day I was astonished to find Hafiz giving instruction to a cadre of beggars. He was explaining to us how much better off we would be, if we were drunk right from the get go, and he was passing out copies of his latest poem, saying, Drink these my friends… Drink these with the rising sun… The idea being– all our surly ideas about fate and how things really work and who could of and should […]

A Day I Remember

July 22, 2015

by Michael

comments 28

Poetry

On that summer day, that I still remember… doorways beckoned from every direction, hovering near stacked horizons as if the Beloved had hung wreaths of heat and time along our world’s borders. There were voices you could see occasionally, ribbons of them wafting up from the ends to mix with the sky like jugs of clear sap poured into whiskey, swirling and touching noses and everything at once… merging. And the air, too. The air….! […]

A Good Treatment

March 9, 2015

by Michael

comments 28

Creative

However it happened—none can really say. I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. […]

When I Say Jesus…

January 31, 2015

by Michael

comments 64

Christ / Poetry

When I say Jesus in these poems, I hope you don’t think that I think that I know with any real precision what I’m talking about. When a stone says yes to one day returning to the shimmering heart of a star, and the star says yes to beaming that stone’s endless heart through all of space and time, and the gravity inside of every pebble, rock, and speck of sand becomes a continuum of Meaning, […]

The Art of Pearl Diving

September 6, 2014

by Michael

comments 15

Christ / Poetry

See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]