Mightylikely

A Creation Story By Me, 30 yrs. ago

2010-03-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

TRILOGY

I.
“Atom.” said God.
The others moved closer to see. It was suspended at a point precisely centered between the thumb and forefinger of God. It was a simple thing, yet possessing a terrible vitality. Lively parts of it circled the more sedate center in delirious rings.
“It is a virtual nihility.” said one of those present.
“Yes.” said God. “It is filled with empty space, yet bound, one part to another, for all the distance.”
“What will you do with it?” queried the one, dubiously.
“I will create a universe.”
“A universe made of atoms? How strange that should be.”
God raised his hand until the tiny thing was before his eye. “An atomic universe.” he said. “Incredibly and wonderfully strange.”
God smiled.

II.
The nucleus was a fiery sphere. Precisely spaced in the void between them, lesser spheres attracted and balanced each other into infinite ellipses around the nucleus.
The others pressed forward and peered over God’s shoulder.
“Another atom?” ventured one, cautiously.
“A universe.” replied God. Stretching forth his hand, he pointed past the object of their concentration. Beyond, at incredible distances were other nuclei, each circled by lesser orbs. The sight stretched outward into intricate chains of casually bound orbiting units.
“The atom was small.” commented one. “We did not imagine that you intended to enlarge it.”
“I did not enlarge the atom.” said God. “Come.”
God lead them through the vast spaces between the units and into the orbital boundaries of one. They approached one of the glowing lesser orbs, and did not stop until they stood on its surface.
God reached down and retrieved a piece of the surface. The others stared as he held it before them. “Atoms.” said God.
The others examined the surface. They examined the unfamiliar things that came up out of the surface and which moved on and above the surface. They nodded one to another. “An atomic universe.” they said in awe.
Then God said, “Meet the new intelligence.”
They turned and came close to the new being, and examined it. They conversed among themselves. “Atoms.” they said.
And Atom smiled.

III.
A star died. Its death throes outshone the other stars in the skies of countless worlds for billions of years.
The atomic universe was old.
The restless hand of God moved to other creations, and no atomic intelligence could remember him.
Obscure among the stars, on a small world, a man stretched forth his hand in a dark place. Shining in the perimeters of his consciousness were the searing lights of the novae of his species -- Democritus, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton. They existed only in the afterlight that traveled at the speed of generations, touching one man and then another.
Gold leaf stirred. The watchful intelligence in the shadow noted the disturbance.
For the first time in recorded history, a man held an integral portion of the universe in his hand, and comprehended the nature of the thing he held.
“Atom.” said the man.*
And he smiled.

*In 1911, Ernest Rutherford pioneered the planetary model of the atom, through his gold foil experiment.

The Fate of Eden

2010-03-05T15:32:00.000-08:00

Eden no longer seems to be located south of Baghdad and north of Kuwait, which I suppose is a good thing since it’s not exactly prime real estate these days. I have heard a number of ideas about what happened to Eden, including the idea that it was literally pulled up, ground and all, and hauled away into the Beyond. The Genesis account tells us only that Adam, Eve, the snake, and, one imagines, all the other creatures, who though they weren’t participants in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil fiasco, were still affected. The reason for the expulsion was the Tree of Life, which the official report states granted immortality. I imagine it as containing some sort of nutrient that repaired the cells so that the breakdown of aging did not occur. I even have a name for the nutrient - Vitamin Chai (Hebrew for life), but maybe I am going too far in my creativity here.

Whatever they unraveled by violating the boundaries of the wrong tree was so shattering that they could not be allowed to go on in that condition forever. So they were denied access to the only source of Vitamin Chai. That’s my version, anyway.

The Bible’s reason for it is that they had become “like one of us, knowing good from evil, “and what if he should live forever!” My teachers expanded that to mean that by eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil that they had become exposed for the first time to evil and had thereby become evil; and evil could not be granted immortality. But the name of the forbidden tree was not the Tree of Knowledge of Evil. The name of the Tree grants knowledge of both good and evil. Yet, the traditional understanding of the story focuses on the new awareness of evil. By learning about evil, they learned, as an afterthought, to contrast it with the good. But perhaps it is equally true that the good they comprehended was as transforming as the evil.

Since God states that man has become “as one of us”, it seems to me that he doesn’t regard him as having turned evil on the spot. Rather it seems, again, as though the humans and the snake have crossed a boundary prematurely. They don’t possess the maturity to properly absorb what they have experienced, and as long as they remain in the garden with access to the trees, they will continue to operate on the wrong side of the boundary where they have no business being. So a new boundary must be set, and this time there is a guard to enforce the boundary. Whether or not this story is all about the beginning of evil, the narrative takes a definite downward trend from the time they crossed the boundary of the forbidden tree.

The only way it makes sense to me that all of creation had to pay the price earned by only two species - snake and human - is if they unraveled something crucial to the entire setup when they violated the boundary around that Tree. Either way, my way or the traditional way, we at the other end of time, know that for eons, all creatures have been caught up in life cycles, with the pain and labor, and yes the joy and adventure (not mentioned in the passage) within the cycles of life, through to our final and controversial exits from this universe of turning, spinning wheels and gears. We are so bound up in cycles, down to the route of electrons around the center of the atom, as distant as the wheeling of galaxies, that it is impossible to imagine it any other way, impossible to know, even, if all this cycling was part of the original design.

For me, that is the Big Question, or at least one of the Big Questions. It seems that every part of the universe, far beyond our world, is devised around spinning and turning, from the whirling of our world to the orbit of the moon, from macrocosmic to microcosmic, everything is whirling. From the birth of seasons to the birth of generations, we are born, we go through the phases, we complete the cycle. If this wasn’t part of the original plan of creation, that everything would have its day, and the day itself would whirl into a new day, I cannot help but wonder if what they did at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil literally spun the whole gizmo out of control. Were there these crazy orbits and circles before? Is it possible that the very spinnage is what kills us - day night day night, light dark light dark, winter spring summer fall, round and round, until we are worn to frazzle? Impossible to know, impossible to step outside of the turning, whirling and spinning wheels of life to imagine an alternative. It is as futile as a scientist trying to step outside of time in order to understand the nature of time. (Time is the one thing that appears to be linear, but I doubt that it is. Time is probably a circle, too, one whose circumference is so large that it appears to be flat, just as the surface of the earth appears flat to the eye.)

At any rate, the final division of Creation occurs with the expulsion of Eden. The first division was the separation of light from darkness, and it rings true in a literary sense that separating Eden from the three who have learned about the separation of good and evil is another level of separating the darkness from the light, evil from good. It works quite tidily until we consider that many more species than humans and snakes ended up outside of Eden with no clear explanation why, at least not in the traditional telling.

By now, you may have detected that I seem a bit resistant to the notion of original sin. I admit that I cannot wrap my mind around justice that punishes the unborn, the uninvolved, the not present, not yet existing, along with the perpetrators of a crime. Life itself does this, apparently in the natural flow of things: the innocent suffer, and bad things happen to good people. In the sense of random justice, this is exactly what happens. But the whole point of the creationist story is that there was Someone in Charge. Creationists reject the other popular theories - Big Bang and Evolution - because random effect does not make sense. Yet the most common interpretation of the creation story in Genesis is that God’s judgment works in exactly the same way. Never mind if you were a horse innocently grazing on the other side of Eden when the fruit fiasco occurred. Never mind if you were born thousands upon thousands of years later. If you were in any way a part of creation on earth at that time, or any time thereafter, you serve the sentence. And as some would have it, you deserve every zit, every broken bone, and every disaster you suffer -- because you were born of tainted stock. And you are tainted because someone…time out of time ago…disobeyed.

Yet the story itself does not say that they were thrown out because the disobeyed. They were thrown out because eating from the Tree changed them. They have become as one of us, and what if they reach out and eat also from the Tree of Life? It doesn’t talk about sin or having become tainted. It talks about having become changed, having gained knowledge, having, specifically, become more like God. This is odd when the point has already been made that the humans were created in God’s image. Yet now that they have disobeyed (that point not being stressed) and partaken of the knowledge (that point being stressed), they must die. Eventually. After 900 or so years. Which is nigh near immortal by today’s standards, but I suppose it doesn’t seem immortal when one is 899 years old.

I’m not saying that I completely reject the disobedience/sin motif as an interpretation of the story. I am saying that it seems more complicated than that. The disobedience/sin scenario doesn’t make sense when one considers the innocent horse in the garden and the baby born in the year 2010. Not in and of itself. There has to have been more at stake than simply that they were bad and ate the forbidden fruit. Yet even if we go with my idea that that they unraveled something basic to the fabric of creation, there are still open-ended issues to be resolved. Such as, was God taken by surprise with the whole crossing the boundary of the forbidden tree thing? We get the sense that God is having to do some spur-of-the-moment damage control. Quick, separate the three perpetrators from the Tree of Life, throw them out of Eden and beef up security at the gate. That works until you get to the other side of Eden’s gate, and find not only is the whole world dying, but even the distant stars go nova and die.

Note about the graphic: This graphic is probably copyrighted by Blizzard Co., producers of the game World of Warcraft. WOW is a SF/Fantasy game which is based on a conflict between good and evil forces. The war of good vs. evil seems to be basic to our culture, and forms the basic plotline for many of our secular works, from Star Wars to Harry Potter to World of Warcraft. The graphic shows the imaginary city of Dalaran that was pulled up by its roots, leaving a huge crater, and moved to another continent. Every time I see it, I think of Eden being whisked away.

The Fate of Woman, and Man

2010-03-03T17:57:00.000-08:00

It seems that at the point where the woman gets her sentence, there should be mention of what women call “The Curse.” It is only in menstruation that the human female seems to have been singled out uniquely among creatures for gender-specific pain and inconvenience. Granted, child birthing is no picnic, but that is not unique to the human female. Ask the mother of a colt how she feels about giving birth to a creature with hooves - that can’t be an easy thing, and horses didn’t bother the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as far as we know. The KJV is less specific than my Jewish version. It seems to destine woman to a more generalized sorrow to do with the whole experience of being female. Both versions lock her into a cycle whereby she yearns for her husband and thus continues to produce children in sadness.

The final blow is when she is placed in subjugation to her husband, for only God knows why Adam would be considered qualified to rule over anything. He hasn’t done a very good job at ruling himself (as shown by his joining Eve and her snake friend at the Tree.) But it has already been established that Adam is the namer of names. Naming is powerful. When you name something, you define it. It is a sign of mastery that Adam names things. He names the animals, and now he names the woman “Eve”. Naming is the easy part of mastery. In some ways the curse of woman is equally upon the man - now he is expected to rule his wife, but it is obvious that he will never really be able to control her.

Then Adam receives his sentence. Cursed be the ground because of you… He will have to till the earth as he did in Eden, but now the earth will resist his efforts. We imagine that this is when plants began to bristle with thorns, leaves turned poisonous, and squirrels began stealing our tomatoes, deer began munching up our corn, and hedgehogs began to undermine everything.

With that, God drives them out of the garden and nothing is ever the same again - not only for the guilty three, but everyone and eveything who were in the near vicinity of the crime, as well as those who weren’t…on down to the very dirt, and down down down through time … to include us.

The Fate of the Serpent

2009-12-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

I read the curses upon serpent, woman, and man in two ways. The most obvious way to read it is that God got really mad - generations worth of mad. Indeed, that is the way the curses read - In both Bibles beside me, the verbiage is that God is sentencing them to enmity, pain, and anguish. Hard to get around that. Still, I can’t get past the notion that the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree - whether symbolic or literal - caused not only a change in consciousness but a change in the fabric of creation. No matter how you read the curses - whether as the sentencing of a harsh and unforgiving God upon the guilty and the unborn in equal measure or as a commentary by a God who sadly states the way of the new world they have discovered - the fates of the three miscreants ring true.

The serpent gets his sentence first. It is doomed to crawl on its belly, which begs the question, what was it like before it got itself into trouble? I have heard from other sources that the original serpent was a lovely feathered, winged, and scaled creature, which makes sense because the ancient stories from cultures around the world include winged serpents. From Quetzalcoatl and Kukulkan of the Americas to the rip snorting dragons of the East, the winged serpent is deeply imbedded in the human consciousness. The passage itself does not say. Nor does it say if it was unusual for a serpent to be chatting away with humans. Again, there is a lot of speculation from other sources. I was taught that the serpent was either the Devil in disguise or it was demon possessed. Nothing that is literally written in the third chapter of Genesis hints at this, although I know people who go symbolic on me at this point and read all sorts of things into it including the idea that the curse upon the serpent predicts the incarnation of Jesus Christ. If we go symbolic, we can go anywhere, and who is to say who is right. Me, I’m staying with the script at face value, hoping I’ll bring less trouble upon myself!

At face value, God holds all three participants to be personally responsible for the fiasco at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I have seen plenty evidence for a literal interpretation of the curse placed upon snakes when it comes to their relationship with women today. A woman sees a snake - doesn’t matter if it’s a little garter snake or an innocent king snake - she badgers the men of her household until they go out with hoes and shovels and destroy the poor creature. Okay, that’s a generalization. Sometimes the woman will take the hoe and destroy the snake, herself. And yeah, right, not all women act like that and there are male snake haters, too, but I’ve seen enough instances to make an impression on me that there is something in the female wiring that is cause and effect: woman sees snake, snake dies before sundown. Men are more apt to co-exist with one in the neighborhood. This scenario, which I’ve seen enacted time and again, is so eerily evocative of the sentencing in Eden that it is no wonder that many smart people regard the passage as completely literal from beginning to end.

Childhood's End

2009-12-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

But just in case they still don’t get it, God roundly curses serpent, woman, and man. From here on out, life will be harsh.

God’s reasoning for all that is to follow is stated in Genesis 3:22, 23.

Here, once again, the Hebrew falls into the plural when referring to God. Both Bibles translate it as “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” (Man, meaning human, as the word clearly applies to the whole couple.) I guess the singular translation, would be, “Yikes! They have become like me, to know good and evil.” (Or good and bad, as the Jewish translation has it. With apologies to the Jewish translators, Bad just doesn’t have the same dramatic effect when balanced against Good, so I’m sticking with Evil.)

The way I was taught, there were aleady a host of angels in existance at this time. The Christians also hold that there was the Trinity, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that could have made up the “Us”. At any rate, it is not specified in this passage whether God was alone and talking to himself or, if there were others with him, who and what they were.

This passage reminds me of a conversation among adults about children. It’s as though Adam and Eve are children who have stumbled into adult matters prematurely. They have lost their innocence, and it’s up to the adults to set up boundaries while they are still too young to behave responsibly with what they have discovered.

The boundaries in this case, are severe. Again, it seems to have been more than a matter of simple disobedience since the results are so extreme. When the humans crossed the boundary, something major unraveled that shook creation down to its smallest components.

After God finishes sentencing them, he rather touchingly makes clothes for them from animal skin. (The first time the use of animals for human consumption is implied. Was the animal who gave its skin the first thing to die?)

And speaking of nakedness, the point is made several times that Adam and Eve were naked, first unaware, then aware and uncomfortable about it. One supposes this may be a symbolic nakedness, although it could be that for the first time they noticed that they were the only animal without fur, feathers, or scales. Perhaps they also noticed they lacked tails. This has always bugged me. There are times when a tail would be useful, although overall, it would be just another body part to worry about and it would make dressing complicated. (Not to mention all the extra mischief people would make with their long tails.)

Anyway, it is interesting that the humans made clothes out of leaves (the KJV says they made aprons; the Jewish translation says loincloths), and it was God who replaced the vegetarian garb with skins. The clothes God made are of heavier material and it is implied that they are more of a complete ensemble, since the KJV specifies “coats” and the Jewish translation says “garments.” God was making traveling clothes that he intended to hold up for a journey.

Because the next thing he does is throw them out of the Garden of Eden.

A Tree Grows in Eden

2009-12-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

In this version of the creation story (beginning with the second part of Genesis 2:4), things are created in a slightly different order. We have an earth with no rain, and no growing plants. God then creates the male human, after which he then plants the garden in Eden with the Tree of Life in the center, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil whose location isn’t specified. The specific geographic location of Eden itself is noted, situating it as the fountainhead for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and two other rivers whose names aren’t as familiar to me (Gihon and Pishon.)

In this version, Adam tills and tends the garden. He names the animals, which establishes once again that he rules over the other creatures. God warns him away from eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and apparently there is no problem until God creates Eve.

Much has been written about the significance of forming the woman from Adam’s rib. It certainly seems symbolic although it could be scientific in that God wants her to share his DNA. He wants them to be related, which seems a bit odd given the almost universal taboo that later evolved regarding incest. It sounds rather like God cloned Eve from Adam, thus setting him up as her parent and her twin as much as her mate. If this is indeed literal, one wonders why he wants them to be so closely tied genetically.

Mysteries abound in this short, but powerful story. We are getting to that wretched tree now. God has said that if they eat of the tree, they will be doomed to die. Judging by the earlier Creation account (Genesis 1:1-2:4) death is unknown. Things get born, but there is no life cycle. Enter the talking serpent, allegedly the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that God has made. (Do the other animals talk? It’s not specified, and it’s not important to the storyline, but one wonders these things.) One thing leads to another and Eve, then Adam eat the fruit. Immediately their entire reality shifts and nothing will ever look the same again. They perceive nakedness where they didn’t before. The illusions have been stripped away in a consciousness-expanding experience, and the upshot is they no longer fit where they belonged before. Even if God hadn’t shown up and thrown them out, it’s quite obvious that life as they knew it before is over. The experience has changed them, and in so changing, they have changed their place in the universe.

Viewed as I just stated it, God seems less the unforgiving parent figure who pronounces curses on serpent, woman, and man and all their unborn generations for thousands upon thousands of years including our own; which is how I’ve read it before. The situation is more serious than having read the wrong book, thought the wrong thought, or of having stumbled upon an inconvenient realization. It may be more serious than simple disobedience. Whatever they did by partaking of the tree, they have changed not only their own awareness, but the very fabric of creation down to the molecular level. Whether one takes it literally or symbolically, this is the risk of seeking knowledge. Partake of it, and your world changes, and you can’t go home again.

The Word for God

2009-11-29T13:58:00.001-08:00

There seem to be two separate sources of the creation story included in Genesis. The first version is contained in Genesis 1:1 - Genesis 2:4. In this version, the male and female humans appear to have been created at the same time, which makes sense since God has apparently already created the other mammals in pairs.

The second version of the story begins in the second part of Genesis 2:4. This is the story of the solitary man in the garden. In this version, the project has already been completed, the first Sabbath (and perhaps more) has been observed -- and the female is an afterthought. Although the story is quite interesting, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that it only occurred to God to create a female human after he noticed that Adam couldn’t find a suitable helpmate from among the other creatures, all who had a mate. And it’s downright weird that God builds her out of Adam’s rib instead of from the dust that served to create all the other creatures, including the male.

But, more on that later. Some may argue that the two versions aren’t really two versions - that what I am calling the second version of the creation story just expands on the first. That is possible, but the writing style is different, most noticeably in the word they use for God. Through Genesis 2:4, the English translation is God (and the Hebrew letters spell Elohim (which indeed is a plural form.) At the point where I perceive a second version of the story, the translators for both the KJV and the Jewish version write the English as LORD God (and the Hebrew letters are Yhvah Elohim. This is where the name Jehovah and its later transliteration, Yahweh, came from. Religious Jews avoid pronouncing it either way, holding that the name of God is too sacred to speak. They will substitute it with Adonai, or other generic words for God.

My guess is that when they got around to recording the scripture in written form that they pulled the creation story from two popular versions of the oral telling. Apparently, they regarded both versions as important, and didn’t worry about which was the more accurate to fact. It is even possible that the creation story was never intended to be read as a historical documentary. This never crossed my mind for the first 26 years of my life, since I was brought up to believe that the Bible was a documentary from beginning to end. As a result, I had no end of problem with the Bible in places where it seems to fall apart logically. It was an Episcopalian friend who first informed me that not all Christians require that that one believes the whole Bible literally. Conservative Jews, also, don’t hold hard-and-fast to a rigid literal interpretation of the Bible. The rabbis will state quite casually that that it hasn’t been proven that any of the key events took place. But, they say, proving or not proving doesn’t lessen the value of the ancient writings.

I tend to be a fence-sitter when it comes to things I cannot prove or disprove. For all I know first-hand, the stars could be glued to the dome of my sky, and the sun and the whole known universe is all about us just as Genesis seems to imply. Old habits are hard to break. I tend to take the Bible at face value, just as I was taught. Which explains, I suppose, why I have quarrels with a great deal of it. But we’ll get to that later. First we need to take a look at the Tree in the Garden.

In The Beginning, God

2009-11-28T13:33:00.001-08:00

When God begins to create the heaven and the earth, there is darkness and a wind from God sweeping over the water. It is not clear what the deep is, but since there is water, I visualize a watery darkness, and the deep is underwater. I won’t even speculate about the wind.

Apparently, the overall situation is kind of like adding a new area to one’s house, for surely God hasn’t been in the dark for all time up until the Beginning. He must have other “rooms”, other areas of creation where it isn’t so gloomy. But as far as we on this world are concerned, this is The Beginning of All Things. On with the story.

God creates light and likes it, but doesn’t like where it is, so He begins to do division, and the more he divides things, the more He comes up with.

He separates light from darkness.

He separates the sky from the water.

He separates the water from dry land.

He then pauses with the dividing, to bring in seed-bearing plants and trees.

Then he does some more division.

He divides night from day.

And since that is going so well, he creates the sun to dominate the day and the moon for the night, and then as an afterthought, the stars. All of these celestial objects are created for their effect upon the earth. Since this is so clearly stated in the Bible, it is no wonder that people like Galileo got into trouble when they mentioned the sun and stars didn’t seem to be orbiting the earth at all based on what they were seeing through their telescopes. But back to the script as recorded.

On the fifth day, God really gets into the ocean project. He even creates giant sea monsters, according to the Jewish translation. (The KJV specifies less excitingly that it was whales.) The land belongs completely to the birds. He designs the sea creatures and birds, as he did the vegetation, to reproduce, which makes good sense because it saves him a lot of time since he doesn’t have to create each one individually to fill up the sea and skies. He can now move on to other things while they discover the joys of reproducing.

We are into the sixth day now, and he adds creeping things and wild beasts of every kind. The only creature specifically mentioned in this phase of the project is cattle, which is still an herbivore to this day. It is very obvious that the birds and land creatures are vegetarian. It does not state what the sea creatures ate.

Then, as the best literature will do, the most exciting part isn’t mentioned until nearly the end of the project. God says that he will make man in His image, after His likeness. The Jewish translation has a note about the Hebrew original. God is referred to in plural. This opens up all sorts of possibilities, particularly since the passage would then read “Let us make man in our image, our likeneness…in the image of God they created him, male and female.” Which could imply that God was Gods, both male and female. Indeed, Jewish tradition holds that the first human was both male and female which, while God was in the mood to do division, was later split into the separate genders. This doesn’t follow for me since God already had the animals and plants reproducing -- unless separate genders were an afterthought for them as well.

The Jewish translators have a note in their version that the Hebrew We and Our and Us in this case is probably a “plural of majesty.” In other words, God is so great, he cannot be contained in a singular pronoun. So much for Gods plural.

The humans get to be fruitful and multiply also, but there is more for them. They are to be the masters of the rest of the creatures. It is not clarified what this mastery involves since it is implied at this point that they are not hunting or domesticating the other creatures for food or using them for labor. It is a very pleasant sounding vegetarian world, where there is birth but apparently no dying. One wonders how long this can go on until it is very crowded. But never fear - the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is about to make an appearance.

A Larger View

2009-11-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

Click on the graphic to view the woodcut in a larger size. Many people have colorized the graphic, but I couldn't resist having a go at colorizing it myself.

Whirligigs & Clockworks

2009-11-27T15:04:00.001-08:00

There is some controversy about the origin and meaning of this old woodcut. I can’t tell you for certain how long it has been around, or if the artist was some French guy named Flammarion, but the meaning is obvious to me. It is, quite simply, a picture of me.

When I was very young, I accidentally strayed too far toward the edge of reality as it was defined for me by my elders, and broke through the boundary. The following years of my life were spent trying to resolve what I had glimpsed outside the boundary with what I had learned about our world up until then. But breaking through changed everything, including that which was supposedly familiar and known. It changed me in such a way that I was never able to fit back into the cozy boundaries that the people around me seemed to take for granted.

The creator of the woodcut has captured the wonder and the glory of a journey of universal discovery, but it is not really a comfortable scene. The edge of the sky has been torn beyond repair. Even though he has tried to stay grounded, as can be seen by the fact that he is in almost full-body contact with the earth, it is obvious that the discoverer will never again be simply a creature of his own world. He is doomed, you might say, to spend his days a half-and-half creature -- half skeptic, half mystic. He will always be skeptical of the platitudes that are given to him that are supposed to define reality because he knows first-hand that it isn’t as small or as simple as has been said. Yet that same glimpse has shown him that you cannot completely discount anything, for in such a large universe, who is to say that something might or might not exist.

So I have never been an atheist. It seems to me that it takes as much faith to believe that God is not, as it takes to believe that God is. And besides, I have an affinity with creators because I am one of those people born with too many talents, all of them to do with creativity. I am obsessed with creating and can’t stop, so it is no great leap for me to presume that there is a Creator greater than myself who crafted everything that I have discovered; a Creator who may have been a little bit nuts with all his creativity; Someone who designed the whirligigs and clockworks whose gears kept spinning until I, indirectly, at least, was created by Him.

Far be it from me, however, to presume that I can guess what He was thinking when he created the works and wound it up and set it free, a device with so many intrinsic parts that something was bound to go cockeyed. And cockeyed it certainly is. Life as we know it is equal parts splendid and awful, and though we can comprehend that there is balance in pitting creativity against destruction, we wonder if that was what was really intended. In the beginning.

In the Beginning, God Created. Different peoples have different Creation stories. My second favorite is the Native American story where a Super Being sneezed, and we were born of her snot. Something like that. It’s the sneeze and the snot that made the impression, and it makes me smile because it is even less dignified than the dust to dust thing; it seems to be a story designed to keep us humble even as we believe ourselves the highest species on earth. But my favorite Creation story is in Genesis, possibly because it was the first one told to me, possibly because it is the one that my people subscribe to. That makes it mine. It is the one I return to again and again, even though if one reads it literally, the cosmology described in the first chapters of Genesis seems a little off.