Looking Up Up Up

The sun could not be more gracious - lighting up the sapphire blue Rio de La Plata connected to the sky, calm, resting, not rushing, not stopping the weird green things that floats or flow in from God knows where on the other side of the Rio, and it lands on our small sandy beach. It is covered with some sort of weird tiny bugs (smaller than Lady Bugs), that probably took the ride from across the waters, and will silently die.
 
I wonder about the alone daily fisherman with his simple tall fishing pole sitting right where, I guess, he catches fish for a meal and surely knows those insects. Pole fishing can be a lonely task, a peaceful one, a victorious one and a fisherman can embrace solitude and prayer and brilliant sun dusting off the river, until he has a bucket full enough to feed, I guess, his family. The big bouquets of green stalk, large thick leaves, and all kinds of connections mixed up together like wild telephone wires - arrive on the sandy shore until they break away, and die, and there is no more beauty in their sail that pushed them into our shore. It is not a popular plant. Someone in the city must scoop them up and take them to some dump, I think.
 
But one wonders where such things birthed, began, took hold in that long river that was the result of four rivers pouring into one giant mass of water to float down to the Atlantic Ocean. You don’t see these plants on the Mississippi. But there is probably something similar that the barge floaters must cut away. There are lots of things to think about in the peace that floats around the skies and silent rivers that are far enough away from the giant cargo ships transporting whatever is on tap that day and someone must make sure they don’t get clogged up with such heavy-set weeds of a sort. 
 
In 1964 - about the time of Kennedys’ assassination - there were two young radio astronomers who heard eerie and persistent hums from the heavens. Could it had been pigeon droppings stuck in some horn? Or something that was not in our mental system? However, the scientists discovered by accident they had detected the beginnings of space and time. Were they listening to the last sigh, last breath of the Big Bang which birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago? But only at that moment was it detectable - a sort of faint hiss of microwave radiation that still can be heard in the distance by the scientists who know how to hear those kinds of things. At least it proved to scientists that there was beginning of the universe. Noise there was. Maybe it was timeless. Maybe it was just kick starting. Up to then the fancy and knowledgeable scientists had debated whether the universe even had a beginning, but who was going to figure that one out? They send a bunch of things deep into the darkness where light escapes and yet no one really knows anything so sumptuous as we know must exist out there, not just in our dreams.
 
There is so much out there we don’t know, or we might have just had a blink of because someone was watching the night skies or listening for noises so extinct and maybe even lovely that those researchers had to agree that the universe did have a beginning, and that that beginning would go on forever. Dennis Overbye, a researcher, got his act together to start investigating these things that he had found way out there in nowhere and it probably could be pinched, squeezed, and dissected. We are told that some microwave fuzzes were leftovers of things that happened when the cosmos was less than one-trillionth of a second old (who could count that?) but it so excited the Overbye’s team as they could discover in the microwave fuzz things had left a note or two behind to stir up the beginnings of the beginning. At one point they heard a sound, a fuzz, at least one-trillionth of a second old, when they might have heard a “hiss” - which at one point happened to be pigeons roosting on an antenna. I love that image. A Messi thing, it seems. We are all so enthralled by a star named “Messi” if you are interested in the sports world, and maybe it is carrying over into all sorts of places.
 
Most of us ooh and aah on those nights when the moon looks like it is going to roll over the city or there is something red reflecting up there in the sky. Where we live, the sunsets are like enormous jewels of color that seem impossible. I remember in Montevideo each December, there would be on the horizon (over the sea) that gave us the brightest red moon. It looks like it is so huge that it is going to munch us up for a meal, so we stand there like statues in such awe that truly there is giant things out there, and maybe God is pulling them up and down to give us the joy and the beauty of what our tiny earth owns. We get so charged up, we want to see our scientists and astrologists and even poets checking out reality and teaching us the whys and whens and hows of so much out there in the universe that is limited for us because we are little humans jammed on a street in deep traffic or climbing some exotic mountain where all of night is like a giant embrace.
 
We hope what we saw was really what we saw and maybe in the seeing, we learned something, and yes, it is real and truthful if we just want to believe how extraordinary the universe is and that somehow it is God’s place. All of us, believers or not, are promised we will step through a golden gate to stand before Him in the long run. Who knows what happens after that - where we will be either body or soul, a floating soul where we all will know one another? Those who had short earth terms will join the long terms and not have to worry about anything because in Heaven, God is in charge, and His healing and helping and harvesting is all about good things garnered by Love. 
 
Dennis Overbye pointed out that that the universe had a beginning, and there was a chance it would go on forever, at least it gave a reason to start researching these things in the labs, where Dennis Overbye wrote that it could be pinched, squeezed and dissected and encoded in some sort of microwave fuzz, vestiges of events that occurred when the cosmos was less than one-trillionth of a second. Don’t even try to figure that one out - and brimming with energies far beyond the capacity of modern particle colliders (their words). Its discoverers and developers were Dr. Robert Wilson and Dr Arno Penzias. Wilson lives in Holmdel and has the keys to the telescope. He wanted to measure the brightness of the galaxies. Whenever they found a persistent hiss where they pointed the telescope, the sky was too warm. No matter what they did, they could not get it to do right. The cause, apparently, was a pair of pigeons who had roosted on the narrow end of the antenna - you know how pigeons can be. They were shushed away, but they returned immediately. It was their ground, apparently.

~ Rev

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