Big Talk

‘when the mystics speak of worlds beyond scent and colour, 
the common man… cannot grasp their reality.’

~ Rumi

Cosmologists say, ‘if the sun was a door,
the earth would be the size of a dime’.
And I try to envision the vastness that I love —
a sun-door through which earth could enter.

But we shouldn’t think of ‘space’
as an empty container, we should think
in terms of interactions. Carlo Rovelli
uses the analogy of a kiss. He asks,

‘Where is the kiss now?’ So I follow
the event through a series of synapses,
the sensations both on and below my skin
until what’s left is the remembered kiss,

which reminds us that outside of our planet,
nothing is being seen in real time. The past
is being carried by light, like film that has to be
developed in a very dark room. Space isn’t

distinct from matter, it bends and curves
like a seashell around the gravity of planets.
We’re living in a universe that doesn’t make sense
when trying to approach it through the senses.