Female yoga figure against universe background with Supernova explosion.
In every second of time the visible beings, large and not so large, vegetable and animal, are growing out of the invisible with a force so subtle yet so irresistible they can break a rock or split an atom. Out of almost nothing came the leviathans of trees and beasts, inexorably expanding to a destined size. Out of a almost nothing, almost but not quite — for there is the fact we tend to overlook or take for granted: the capacity of the smallest unit of living matter to grow into stupendous and bewilderingly complicated wholes. It goes on around us all the time; it is the world we live in, and it is ourselves, you and I. We are the event itself, or at least a very significant part of it — giant examples of expansion, marvelously elaborated, and of exceptionally long duration.
Duration is hard to achieve, not that which belongs to crystals and rock but duration of the transcendent form and sparkle that belong to life. Hence the need for continual renewal, of birth from death, of the corn king who dies and the spring queen who brings forth life again. Life is forever being resurrected, not from nothing but from that speck of continuity that breaks off as a bud or seed or egg, leaving the old blown-up construction of the body lagging behind in time to stumble and die.
Each fragment that begins anew, no matter what we call it, has time built into it.
from N.J Berrill’s book – You and the Universe (1958)
THANK YOU to Maria Popova’s ‘Marginalian‘ for this find
