Somewhere in the mental space that occurs within the act of sprinkling a bit of Metamucil (and a tiny bit of turmeric--why not?) on the cat's food to help things along, and the digestion of the assessment of the professionals at Kirkus Review "plotless, repetitive, dialogue bordering on pontification, clogged with small talk and too many characters, etc." (not to quote directly, and not to disagree), and buoyed up by the lovely music of the DC area's own Irish Breakfast Band (awesome), episodes of Stephan Hawking on The Discovery Channel explaining stuff, big stuff, fall in, anchoring one again, and one says to himself, "them Buddhists are basically right."  The Buddhists have, from what I can tell, a pretty good grasp on big numbers.  They have a pretty good sense of how large the stuff in space is, how far it goes on.  And they know too, how many lives you generally have to go through before achieving enlightenment and highest state of mind and that sort of thing.

Boom.  Where before there was nothing, wham!, there is a Big Bang, and all the known stuff comes into creation, out of... something very tiny? something sort of like nothing?  The main thing is that in this great "Viola"the basic law of nature, there is always the preservation of balance, the economy, the equal and opposite reaction to that which happens.  Professor Hawking is good at explaining.  When matter and energy, both positive, are brought into being, there is a corresponding creation of that which perfectly balances it, dark matter, dark energy.  If there is a lot of the visible stuff created, there is a lot of the opposite created.

Which can bring you back to the poetic concept of the Buddha's, that basically it's all like a dream.  And that is a calming thought, as naturally it should be.  No need to work yourself up into a tizzy, or down into a funk over some perceived need.  Life is all part of the great unfolding, a part of that little tiny conscious thing that had a sort of dream to expand and expand.

So is it with our own acts of creativity.  We call forth things out of the void, bringing things into being.  And maybe we know that as we do that we are participating in the great balance, doing our job in being that which is, as The Book of Genesis rightly has it, good.

(And one might postulate, or poetically conjecture, or wonder if it is so that when an artist creates something there tends to be some sort of reaction in nature in the opposite direction.  Maybe it is that the artist is reacting positively to something negative, the beauty of a war poem coming out of the horror.  The setting forth of an ideal out from the fog of the human condition may well meet its forms of opposites, in skepticisms, in real world practices (such as slavery), in ridicule, in firm-footed desires not to understand that ideal.  This sounds like a sophomoric thought, and maybe it is.  Love itself is thought of often in the most cynical of terms, along with the lot of higher things.  "Beethoven, yeah, yeah, nice piano concerto, but what good does it do the economy;  we need more and better widgets, and enough of this 'beauty is truth' crap," one secretly thinks.  Enough to make him not want to leave the house almost.  No wonder something truly great, like Moby Dick, was a big flop, an invitation to authorial obscurity.  We might wonder, too, that so 'connected' we are all the time, that everything will eventually be trivial to us, and that our thoughts will be correspondingly shallow by our attentions being spread so thin.   Yes, when the individual participates in the energy of the Big Bang by creating something, he may be surprised that the reaction is not so much in the same direction, 'wow, that's cool and correct in a deep way,' but in the completely opposite direction, 'you are a big creepy idiot who has no clue about how to comport himself in society.'  Until time comes along eventually and sorts things out, if he was in fact 'correct.'  He may be waiting a long time.  Or, maybe, like Einstein the blackboard scribbles turn out to be so obvious and beautiful and sound as theory they can not be overlooked.  Twain himself did the math: "no good deed ever goes unpunished."  So with groundbreaking art.  What is an artist more aware of on a daily basis then the basic vacuum he or she must operate in?  To the whole thing, you shrug, and say, 'well, that's just nature, the way things are.'  But it is very sobering, if you've ever pretended that you are a writer, to sit down and wonder, 'what am I going to write now, what am I doing, how is this different from doing a whole lot of absolutely nothing?' as I say to myself now.  And it is an oddly similar and corresponding experience to, I would imagine, that grandiose ideally thought of romantic love a juvenile is so certain about, a practical man certain, from experience, of the opposite.  It's about the fish you catch, though it is also perfectly fine to be a naturalist, leaving things be in the wild, I suppose, from an ecological standpoint.  So with writing:  it's not the philosophical tangents, like this one, but about whether you can write compelling dialogue set within a discernible tension-filled plot.)

Our own acts, well, they often seem so small, so trifling, so insignificant.  How could one little action toward the positive amount to much, we ask ourselves.  And yet, when we move in the right direction (toward a basic kindness I won't bother to irritate anyone with description of), we find ourselves buoyed on, uplifted, carried and supported, moving forward with the dream of the Universe itself.  I suppose that is what the Buddha's smile is about.

And if that is true, or if that occurs to you to be something supportive or intuitively sensical, you see more the 'brotherhood,' and 'sisterhood,' (the sexes themselves indication of the great polarity/duality of all things that exist) of all things and all people, all of us born of the seed of our fathers out of our mothers in the same raw awkward beautiful act, all of us carrying forward that beautiful light energy of Big Bangs and smaller bangs each with his or her own grace.  Each of us, a miracle.