💀 TREE 245: Stability exists within movement

Throwback Friday – TREE 31

One.

Gelato Willingbloom, age 6, has fooled and foiled the walking tree by pretending to be a sideways chicken.

Two.

The universe was born with a big bang 13.8 billion years ago. It has been expanding ever since. Galaxies dance and collide. Their bodies are swirling stars. Rogue planets make their lonely ways, unanchored. Our earth, locked in place, races around the sun at 66,616 miles per hour. Continents drift on a sea of molten rock. Glaciers advance and retreat and slowly slowly slide into oceans that are never the same for even a second. Every day the sun sets a little earlier or a little later as we race through seasons telling ourselves that next year will be the one we’ve waited for. While we wait, we eat and sleep and work and play and scroll while our old cells die and new cells replace them as sure as new empires rise and sweep aside the old. And all of it, except maybe the 95% that is dark, is made of molecules made of atoms made of particles made of energy that never ever stops moving.

Stability is not, cannot be, escaping the motion of existence.

Stability is balance and poise as you flow within our ever-moving universe.

Three.

It’s good to think about death. It’s also good to remember we’re here to live.

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Something for the weekend

Then my son, Arthur, died and everything changed. People began to send letters to my home address, letters of condolence, of course, but many were letters from people that essentially said, “This happened to me. I know what you are going through.” It was clear that people were finding some sort of personal salvation by articulating their own particular story for somebody else to hear. It felt to me that they had run out of people who were prepared to listen. This idea had a profound impact on me — the remarkable curative power of the combined acts of telling and listening.

— Nick Cave

Christine shared Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files with me this week. It’s a project where he answers people’s questions. He is interesting, kind and generous. Spend some time there.

Thanks for thinking about death with me this week.

Happy weekend
Jeff