The Dance of the Cosmos

The Dance of the Cosmos
(A meditation for Midsummer)

It is Midsummer, the longest day, and the sun is still bright in the sky. My feet are firm on solid ground.

We am standing on the earth, the earth spinning round at a thousand miles an hour. It feels solid, unchanging, unmoving. But it is not. Under out feet is not solid ground, but a lightening swift movement. Feel it, and sense the motion. The earth is hurtling around the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour. This is the start of our dance around the sun, and who knows where it will end?

The time has come to journey forth, and reach into your minds eye, and come with me, come leave the earth, and rise, through the clouds, until we reach the emptiness of space.

Here is sunlight, raw and beautiful, the darkness of the void, and the solar wind, the particles dashing through space, and we drift outwards, beyond the planets, past the great eye of Jupiter, the rainbow rings of Saturn, and the cold gas giants at the edge of darkness.

We look back from the cold depths of the Oort Cloud, the fringes of the Solar System where the ice cold comets dash to and fro, cold specs of ice and rock.

And we look back, and see in the distance the planets, large gas giants, the smaller planets, and our own green earth, all moving along their ellipses, the motion of the planets in their own stately dance.

And we move further out, and the solar system itself is but one jewel in a sparkling diadem, a part of the great spiral dance of our galaxy, all in flux, all in motion, against the vast gravity well at its centre, straining against that black hole, and turning, a cosmic wheel.

And further out still, and now the galaxies themselves are small spirals, moving in their own dances, against the vastness of the night, the dark backdrop of the universe. A universe of shining beacons in space, all alone in the night.

The cosmos is a dance, and stars coalesce from cosmic dust, and are born in flame, burn so brightly, flare and die to red dwarfs in old age.

This is the dance, and we hear the tune playing, sometimes joyful or plaintiff, or light and small or sombre and booming, and the Lord of the Dance calls to the Universe, and a thousand civilisations, countless sentient beings, reach out to make those notes, and join the dance.

A billion stars, a billion suns, and around on a multitude of these swirl planets, turning, where alien faces celebrate their own seasons, their own midsummer days.

We are but shadows, fragments, each a microscopic spec against this vastness, and yet each mote of dust has its part to play, each moves within the dance; there is a place, and an order within all things, and we follow the rhythms of our universe, back through our galaxy, our sun, our world,, until we are back with feet upon the good soil; we see the branches dancing in the wind, and the passing of the seasons of the earth, and we rejoice that we are one part of this whole.

The universe is vast and awesome, but the molecules of our body are the same molecules that make up this planet, that burn inside the sun and stars themselves. And we are the children of the stars, star dust come alive, the universe made manifest.

And throughout the world, on this midsummer day, people are lighting bonfires, burning wheels cascade down hills, and there is drinking, rejoicing, singing, merriment - and we see that even the least of us is needed, however short our span , we have our part to play, and each note is needed for the song, else the cosmic dance would not be complete.