The universe seems to be made out of nothing, and yet somehow it manages to exist.

Why does the uiniverse go to the bother of existing at all? (Hawking)

'A recognition of the unkowable is the only way to reconcile science and religeon' (spencer, first principles 1894).

The emotions behind religeons, leaving aside superstitions and gross beliefs, is one of awe toward the impeneterable mystery. Information can never satisfy inquiry, positive knowledge does not and never can occupy the whole region of possible thought. What is the explanation of the explanation? Knowledge can never monopolise conciousness

'if it it must always be possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge, then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of religeon, since religeon under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter passes the sphere of the intellect'

Science expresses the knowable, religeon the unknowable. A human knows truly that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known. This is the mark of wisdom. Our ignorance is a sea. Many physicists think that the universe began as a random fluctation in the sea of vacuum, but what if it began as a thought? A web of thoughts?

On Baffin island every spring the Inuit begin their migration. Setting off for the edge of ice, the edge of wherever is where the living exists. Hunting among the ice cliffs rising ponderously from the plastic northern ocean. The spring hunt is essential for the Inuit scattering feet as they sense the narwhale reaching for the sky. Mokta, the skin and the fat beneath. The hunter takes the first taste, but then all is shared among those that gather to help harvest the fruit of the sea.

Can any of us exist without love? The orphans of Romania, a cruel experiment of population increase by Caesecau. The dim light of her eyes silenced by the lack of love of her orphaned parents. The bug eyed wondering of the deprived orphans, they never feel able to be safe and secure, connected to other humans. The joy of loving a child, even if not of your own blood suffuses and drenches the spirit in an all encompassing passion. The wide eyed smle of a child born suddenly into a simple love that reaches out with more arms than two, letting them flourish and grow in the arms of affection and warmth of the human. The smiling joy of the parent, natural or adopted, as their charges blossom into the community and binds us into the web of the human.

'To cast your hand across nature, over fields of rape and corn' (Everything but the Girl)

To share a fire and a fish while the world in the forest hoots and howls beyond the dim dark of the stretching flames, immediate, and crowding in upon the jagged stabs of dark. Does human spirit mean anything at all? Is there any such concept? Exploring the living world is part of our deepest nature, from orang-utan to human, to examine and to consider both the piece and the whole. Even the most dangerous of foes is an exquisite beauty, whether slithering or sliding or biting or crushing. It is alive in all its resplendence. And to be alive is such a precious gift.

What is the difference between a rock and a chicken? How does it matter to us? We eat chickens but not rocks, but is that the extent of our relationship? This is the age of loneliness, the removal of one from the natural world. Eco psychology, the maps of our minds, our words and concepts are formed by the surroundings that we find ourselves survivng in, our metaphors are born of the land that we find ourselves describing, we cannot concieve that which we do not experience, except in abstraction. But abstraction removes us from the human, our connections to our past, stretching back four billion years to the first squirming protcells that wiggled their way from the primordial slime to the dubious sublimity of our human pre-eminence.

It has been a road four billion years long, and in a few swift centuries we have removed ourselves from the earth from which we sprung, and the ground in which we live. We have forgotten how to live. The valley of the sun, Cusco. Sacred landscapes, shooting star flies, clouds across the moon, the earth only exists because the human has breathed conciousness into it like a deep fire describing the world within which it finds itself born. Humans exist in a community, a relationship to the land, its sustenance of you, its benign gift to succour your being. And in return we describe it, define it, and call it to name, to being, just as the Aboriginal have always known, we sing the land to life, and without us there is no song and therefore no land.

We are part of the melody, the tune, the lyric, but our instrument is the earth, and we crush it beneath our heels with a deadly kiss. There are many models of reality, cobwebs of linking truths, none absolute, each a possible glimpse of actuality, but no one story, no one ritual, no one culture can claim the ultimate absolute.

'We all know where home is' (Babba the taxi driver, Sydney)

As we stretched out of Africa, we realised that perhpas we are all one family, but even if that were proven tomorrow to be false, would it matter, because nothing exists alone, everything exists in sacred balance, and each and everything is infinitely preciousin its dwelling deep within the moments of history.

yechydda,