So you wake up in the middle of the night and it’s talking to you. The room, the earth, the night. It’s screaming in some powerful and ancient tongue and just won’t shut up. The drugs can’t push the voice away; hell, maybe they started the conversation. Not on their own though. There’s something too universal and eternal about it; there’s that scary son-of-a-bitch who’s always been waiting to answer.

He answered Christ. He answered Mohammed. He answered Siddhartha. Seems like they sat down and had a nice long chat. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe the sneaky bastard didn’t stop to talk to Christ any more than he’s stopped to talk to me. Maybe he’s been screaming this same message at the top of his lungs for the last several billion years and not a whole lot of people really stopped to listen. Maybe there aren’t a lot of able translators around.

Skip to that midnight dance in Jenny’s backyard, the night when the grass reared up and lived, not in the way that a blade of grass exists, but in a way that made the whole yard alive with the sky, with the night, with my haphazard dance. We don’t see it every day, or at least don’t recognize it, but it’s there, this synergy, this collective life. Watch time lapse photography of a spewing, earth forming volcano, or a busy city street. It’s not evident from the stand point of view; you have to look a little closer, or maybe just look a little differently.

The idea begs a question: how differently? What scale, what point of view, do we have to approach so that everything, the whole mess of spinning galaxies and super-clusters becomes one monstrous living organism? And once we get there what will we see? If this whole world is some sentient being, just what the is it doing? Maybe it’s just sitting around and thinking, talking to itself in a sort of cosmic introspection. Introspection forced by the fact that everything is interior. And then we’re back in that room with the darkness speaking to us.

So what is it saying? We pick up the pottery of ancient cultures, but we’re not particularly interested in shards of clay. We’re looking for the potter. And that might be what the night can’t stop blabbering about: itself, its origin. So we listen not because we care about the night’s story, but about its maker. If we look closely at all these shards of clay we might catch a glimpse of who the potter was. If we’re really lucky he could have signed the bottom.