Had a sort of mystical experience on my way home from Boston today, as my thoughts about the wonderful if (because) disorienting privilege of stepping out of business as usual into thinking about the broader future started to coalesce into a sense of grateful and excited discovery. The story isn't over - if religious stuff happened once it's more arbitrary to suppose it will never happen again than to allow that it might, and might even now. We'll never know how little of the story we know, and yet, knowing this, opening ourselves to it, we are not churned under or pushed aside by the future (or simply forgotten). Sort of Spinozan, I guess.
It was overcast, and we were flying along the coast below a cloud layer which was varied from deep grey to beige, and palest orange on the horizon, all these colors reflected in the ocean below us, which ranged from greyish blues to green immediately below, with hints of mauve in some of the places where the thinner cloud was reflected. There were a few specks far out, boats, which looked like spots in the far distance of one of those Dutch landscapes which are 80% sky, with the difference that the cloud layer just above us made it 80% sea, albeit sea not opposed to sky. The wonder was the swells, two kinds of swells, perpendicular to each other. Fine parallel lines of wave moved up the coast, and across them like thick wool woven in a textile were larger swells moving toward the shore. I don't think I've ever seen this before, though I have spent many hours marveling at the textures and surfaces of lakes and oceans from plane windows.
After a while it seemed an image of patterns and teleologies beyond the linear push in our lives from cradle to grave, lives (individual or of a generation) inevitably finite, contingent and unrepresentative no matter how full or well lived. A different order of causality, a different assurance of meaning. Indeed the ordered movement of the waves felt like more than an image. It seemed like confirmation that, had we but eyes to see it (and this weekend I started to!), such is our existence too.
