Flame & Space

A galaxy is a devotional act

A galaxy is a devotional act, an unfolding cyclone of bhakti.

A galaxy is, at first glance, made mostly of flame. A billion furnaces roiling, raging, exploding in a scatter of raw elements, the primordial stuff that composes everything we see, everything we touch.

These furnace spheres in the sky create life, they sustain life, they provide to everything around them the energy for creation and transformation. But they also unmake everything they touch. Nothing can brush the cheek of a star without losing its existence entirely, without dissolving back into the kiln that birthed it.

To unmake everything that reaches out to touch you — it's not an easy existence.

A galaxy is, at second glance, made mostly of space. Black sprawls of nothingness between stars.

Eternal, unchanging, anchored in the deepest forms of Being, this space holds everything that exists. It gives everything there is the space it needs to exist, to love and be loved, to fulfill its Pattern. That space is intimate with everything, weaving itself into the structure of atoms as well as into the expanses between galaxies. It holds all of it — all of us.

It goes so often invisible, unappreciated; the emptiness that lets it hold and care for everything that exists — that same emptiness also lets its efforts be taken for granted, forgotten.

Nothing can touch the furnace of a living star without being unmade — only Nothing can touch that fire without being unmade. Only Nothing can hold the stars close, only Nothing can give space for the stars to be adored, to be a warming grace as well as a consuming engine.

Only the flame can bring Nothing to life — can fill it with warmth, with matter, with ten thousand billion little specificities; can ornament its depths with wonder. Only the roiling stars can fascinate existence itself.

Each spinning galaxy is a vastness, a practice of devotion between space and energy, an eros ten thousand light years wide, crackling and flowing until the universe falls asleep — until it wakes up again.

---

Each one of us is a galaxy, a spaciousness permeated by energy. Some of us suppress the spaciousness, finding it empty, boring, lacking; others suppress the energy, finding it dangerous, intense, too much.

Each of our relationships is a galaxy, a dance of spaciousness and energy. When we can't find that dance, the relationships fall apart, either into something lifeless, or something frantic and thrashing.

Each of our communities is a galaxy, a complex spin of everyone's interplaying spaciousness and energy, and a galaxy can be a violent and chaotic thing. It's not the nature of a galaxy to be balanced and serene — it's the nature of a galaxy to be alive and awake and raw with toothsome beauty.

It's all a devotional act. It's all a prayer. When we forget this, gravity dissolves, and the galaxy dissolves into the entropic tides. When we forget this, everything that matters loses the intimacy and urgent embrace that makes existence alive.

---