Bottoms Up

The earth weighs six sextillion tons, yet it does not plummet to the bottom of the universe.
Why?
Because the universe has no bottom.
We create riddles by starting with the answer, but the world creates riddles first, with no answer in sight.
Dostoevsky writes in Brothers Karamazov, “Absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

Don't Look Now

This is a computer image with the black holes that riddle the universe highlighted.

At the center of most galaxies lie black holes. While the universe is expanding and forming new things, the black hole is compressing and making things one again, as they were at the Big Bang. 

Black holes are like little round rear view mirrors, so while we’re flying down the highway to nowhere, we can see where we’ve come from, oblivion, and whether it’s catching up to us.

Milky Way

Walking home last night with Christine Reick-Sonntag, I looked up at the Costa Rica mountain sky. “The Milky Way,” I cried, and she started, saying, “Oh, it’s the same in German, Milch Strasse.” The word in Ancient Greek also comes from milk, “Galactica.”

The stars are a river—you cannot step into the same sky twice. The stars brush past us—the light is part of them, and is passing each instant over our skin. The fragile light has traveled millions of years to reach us.

Stars travel in all directions at once. The stream of the Milky Way is made of stones flowing in waves like water everywhere.