I.O.U.

[seymoure]

(The Incredible Oscillating Universe)

I have to start by telling you something I heard from my Cherokee grandmother. We were standing at the stove in her kitchen, as she was stirring a pot of apple sauce she was preparing for canning. I had just gotten angry about tripping over a tree root and falling down to skin my knee. I wasn’t crying. I would be 40 years before I learned to let myself cry. But I was angry. She told me, “I am sure it was an accident. You just tripped, Mr. Tree didn’t want to hurt you, he just doesn’t move quickly enough to move out of your way.”

I don’t know how long I stood and looked at her in amazement before she looked up. She laughed in that voice that sounded like someone scraping on bark with a rasp. “Why do you look so? Always ask, the only way you will always know,” she told me.

“What do you mean about the tree moving its root? Trees can’t do that, they aren’t alive. Well, they are alive, but not like us, they can’t think. Can they?”

“If it is alive, it can think,” she in matter of fact tones stated, “Every thing is alive, and living things think. Maybe not in a way we understand, but they react to the world around them, that is a way of thinking.”

“Wait,” I stammered, “Everything is alive? Like rocks and stuff too?”

“Of course. The universe is alive and we are all parts of it. Some things move at a slower pace than others. To the stones, we are lightning, and just as impossible to understand. To the lightning we are rocks, and just as lifeless appearing. But at the heart of it we are all the same. We are all made up of the lightning. We just cannot see what is the same. I am that energy, so are you. There is nothing that doesn’t have that energy, because there is nothing that isn’t made up of that energy. That is why nothing that’s alive can ever die, it just changes into another hunk of that energy and moves on. When I am gone and you see the lightning blaze across the sky, say ‘Hello Grandma!’ cause that will be me flashing a hello to you.”

She gave me a hug and I stopped thinking about matter and energy for a while. But, inside my head, those thoughts lived with me for the rest of my life.

Everything is alive and everything is energy. There is really no matter, it is just energy moving at a different rate of vibration. She was teaching me Quantum Mechanics, she just didn’t have those words.

But, forever after that, I was titillated by the concepts of eternity and physics.

Now what follows is something I read someplace, or maybe it’s something I just made up. It is sometime hard to be sure about that kind of thing, especially when it’s abstract.

Here it is: In the beginning, if you looked around, you’d see nothing. It would be impossible to find anything, if you could be there, because all the matter/energy was congealed into one infinitely small lump of existence. The power holding that glob together was such that it eventually collapsed, and matter/energy exploded thunderously into what has come to be known as the “Big Bang.”

All that stuff rapidly expanded, to fill the vacuum within the void. It became galaxies and universes and, possibly, even filled multiple dimensions. The power of the initial explosion continued the expansion of all that is or was or will be.

That expansion was time. All that happened, happened by the big bang clock.

It is still expanding today.

When that energy from the original big bang has run out the expansion will continue for a while. But, when the momentum ran out, then the entropy would begin in reality. When the movement out finally stopped, the collapse would begin.

And, since all things were a reaction to the same matter and energy, then their exact reverse action would mean that all of time would go backward also.

And things would move back and back and back until they returned to the same lump from which it had come in the first place.

When all of matter and energy had become that same clump once again, the force that had started it would again be present and another big bang would happen.

An since it was the same matter and the same energy expanding at the same rate, everything would repeat exactly as it had before.

Everything would repeat. Time itself would repeat. Until it reached the end of that power and began its collapse again.

And it would go out and come back and go out and come back, endlessly.

So I have been typing these words a million billion times, and you have read them a million billion times. And I will type them a million billion times, and you will read them a million billion times.

And everything will repeat over and over, endlessly.

You know what this means, don’t you?

It kind of takes the heat off having that second brownie, doesn’t it?

MORAL: Whatever you are going to do, you are going to do be doing it for a long time. Better to enjoy it. Nothing is going to happen that is ever to be worth you’re being ashamed of it. What you do now you imprint in history forever. Have a good time, help someone else and live the life you wouldn’t mind living again. You owe it to yourself and the Universe.

THE END

© C. Wayne Owens