[Steve] However, even though you are so utterly cosmically insignificant, you are also completely unique.
[Arlo] How do you know? There have been, and very well may, billions and billions more people before and after you... how do you know you are "completely unique"? [Steve] You have felt such experiences transform your world in profound ways. You have experienced love so all-encompassing that the only way to describe it in such a way as to give it justice is to talk about being literally IN love. [Arlo] What has always amazed me is the arrogance that we think what WE feel is somehow the first time a human has ever felt love, loss, pain, fear... The things you describe, rather than evidence for eternal isolation and separation, point instead towards a commonality of experience, a shared condition with every other being in our species that has lived or will live... When you look to the stars, in love or in grief, you ask the same questions humans have been asking, in every occurrence of our existence, since we entered the stage... Ten thousand years ago, a father, or a mother, stared at those same stars and felt the same love we feel for our children... Ten thousand years ago someone looked up to those night stars and vowed their eternal love for someone... Years ago, in a different place, I had the fortune of spending a night watching the constellation Scorpio cross the night sky... In thousands of years of history, I am no different than those who came before me, as I held my child and tried to explain the grandeur, she ran off and chased shadows and other childhood fun-things, and I laughed as I was only, perhaps, the latest voice in a story eternally retold... That right there, a hundred, a thousand, more, years past a father watched his child do the same thing... looked up at Scorpio and asked the same questions, loved his child the same way, feared death, loved, mourned, celebrated... Our love and our pain and our questions are all things experienced a thousand fold by humans deep into prehistory... Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
