White Lumps Where the Cars Once Were

The cars in the parking lot across the street are covered in snow. Under the streetlights they glisten white like weird and ghostly boulders. Each lump belongs to someone. And each of those someones had a mother and a father and through sheer innate brilliance of body and mind learned to walk, talk and make their way through this human world. Later on this morning, many of these someones will come out and brush their pile of oddly shaped snow fully expecting to find the car that was there last night. Due to laws of inertia, the special properties of water and the speed with which the earth is spinning as it hurtles around our nearest star which we call ‘the sun’, their car will most likely be there—intact and cold.

I marvel at the many lives around me. Though most of them are sleeping, I’m remembering on this dark white morning that they are not just extras in the feature film of my life. Of course they are that too—each one occupies some small space in the world of my mind. The worlds we human beings live in aren’t exactly imaginary, but everything we see and touch and sense and imagine requires our creative participation.

The light from the streetlight bounces off the snow particles resting on each other and on the car. Some of those particles of light (which are also somehow waves) strike and reflect at just the right angle to make their way into my eye where rods and cones are waiting to receive and acknowledge them. (note to self: The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection – might this mean that what I say about you is equally in some way about me?) It hardly seems there could be enough room for rods and cones in my eyes, but for the moment, I’ll set aside that objection. These supposed rods and cones are quite excited to receive the particles which are also waves. (second note to self: Don’t stop and try to figure everything out or you’ll never get anywhere.) These scores of rods and cones have been designed for just this moment and in their particular white excitement they dance and wiggle and generally have a great time. They are touched and immediately respond by sending tiny bursts of energy along pathways into the dark regions of the brain. The brain which is enclosed in an opaque bony case covered with skin and bathed in a constant flow of blood. In the enclosed and mysterious brain there is no light and no snow, no cars and no someones. But somehow the brain awakens and reflexively responds to create an image of something that is ‘out there’—in this case, white weirdly shaped mounds of snow.

Now this ‘out there’ is what I am designed to dance with. Without ‘out there’ there is no ‘in here’, no me, no perception, no reason, no mounds of snow. But likewise, ‘out there’ is no thing until we meet and touch each other in a thousand unlikely ways. Over the years and through intense early training (thank you Mom and Dad), I have learned to trust the excitements of my eye and even developed a short-hand explanation for the invisibly meshed business of eye and mind and world. I say: ‘I see….’ then go on to fill in some word (filled with a lifetime of meanings and associations) for whatever it is that is reflecting light into my eye and beginning the whole affair once again.

And the whole business of receiving, organizing, associating and naming goes on in the shortest flash of time and is utterly imperceptible to me. Seeing is one of the many processes through which I construct my world and my life in my world without being able to directly experience the creative interchange that is happening. We are all in the construction business but based on the evidence of our experience, we avow innocence. As David Bohm says ‘The mind creates the world, then say ‘I didn’t do it.’

But back to the cold white shapes of snow across the street and to dreaming of other human beings – of other seers and thinkers and imaginers who are now lying in bed or perhaps just waking up to groggily wander toward the bathroom. Each one lives in their own world—the world that touches them—the world that each effortlessly participates in creating.

There are no bit players. Each of us is a swirling universe of sensation and meaning—of hope and fear—of light and dark. Each of us, as Whitman said, contains multitudes and perfectly reflects everything that came before, is here now and will happen.

Perhaps today I can more deeply appreciate the wonder of each other one who crosses my path, brushing snow off their car and driving their separate and intertwined universes to work or to shop or maybe out to the snowy woods for a lovely winter walk.