Among the many reactions–which ranged from anger (somehow) to delight, from patronizing know-it-all-ism to awe, to terror to humility–were questions for me personally, about what I ‘believe.’ Well… I believe a lot of things. And I don’t believe a lot also. And to be clear, I don’t think such an image must cause us to believe or not believe anything in particular. Sometimes it is better, I think, to just look. Listen. Absorb. Try to comprehend. Feel a sense of perspective. Which was the whole point–perspective, that is–of the post.

But, as long as the question was sincerely asked, I will answer. There was a time–a night on a tiny outcrop/island of granite on a wild and silent lake in northern Saskatchewan. We were hundreds of miles from any artificial lights or other human beings, except for the little group I was guiding. Everyone else was asleep. I was lying on my back listening to a distant loon, looking up at that night sky, when the indescribable enormity of it hit me. I looked for a long time. And I then spent years reckoning with the vision of it and the feelings it produced. I wrote an essay about it in my book, Deep Woods, Wild Waters, the essay entitled ‘The Stars of Sandfly.’

And where I landed after all the pondering–the ‘belief’ I finally settled on and wrote about–was this. That in a universe vast beyond all imagining, awe-inspiring and unnerving –even terrifying in its scope and all the unknowns it represents–there is also something else. A balance, if you will. For when we dare to look squarely into the abyss, in awe and fear and wonder, we may also become acutely aware of who and what and where we are at the moment. As I lay there on that little splinter of granite, gazing into infinite time and space, illuminated by light that had left its original source billions of years before, I realized that it was reaching me–touching me–on a little bit of rock as real and and important as any other place in the entire universe. And that our little group of wilderness travelers upon that island were somehow real and important, too. Each one of us. Tiny and insignificant in the scale of things though we might be.

The novelist H.P. Lovecraft wrote a striking passage: ‘Someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ His observation is a succinct description of what psychologists call ‘existential dread,’ and says much about the modern siren song of fundamentalism in its many forms.

But I found on our tiny island under the stars, and in pondering it for years afterward, something else. Another balancing and grounding realization. That no vast nebula, or star cluster, or gaseous cloud or invisible accumulation of dark matter, is inherently more meaningful than a little sliver of granite, with eight travelers resting upon it for the night. No more important than their lives and their loves and their dreams. No more important or significant than the fragrant sweet-gale bushes along the shoreline, or the pale pink corydalis blooming beside me. That it is the small and fragrant and touchable and comprehensible that GIVES to the vastness its meaning. That without someone to ask, and to notice, and to try to comprehend, there is no meaning. The realization I came to–you might call it a ‘belief,’ I guess–is that yes, the universe is vast and impersonal.

But at the same time, in an ultimate balance, it is also personal. It is tiny. It is blooming. It is fragrant. It is vulnerable. It is, even, emotional. Despite the eternal dragons of doubt and fear, despite all ‘evidence’ to the contrary, life has meaning. Each person matters. Despite the impersonal, unimaginable scale of the cosmos…

The universe is also… personal.

This is my latest Substack post. You can also follow/subscribe to me there at Notes From The Campfire@douglaswoodauthor. https://substack.com/@douglaswoodauthor