Butterfly Nebula

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Butterfly Nebula

Institution: St. John's Seminary in Camarillo

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Laura Reece-Hogan delves into the Butterfly Nebula, exploring the intersections of the physical universe, divine, and human experience.

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 5, 2023

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This video video is a transcript of a presentation discussing a poetry collection inspired by themes of curiosity about the natural world and the human condition, particularly during the pandemic. The author explains how their poetry reflects a connection between the expansive universe and intimate human experiences. The poems explore a range of topics, from sea creatures to cosmic phenomena like nebulae, highlighting transformations akin to metamorphosis and resurrection.

Key themes include the interplay of death and new life, the search for identity, and the way understanding the external world can enhance self-awareness. The author shares specific poems, such as "Heart as Sipho" and "Butterfly Nebula," to illustrate these themes, discussing how they delve into both the vastness of the universe and the intricacies of human emotions.

The collection emphasizes that humans are deeply interconnected with nature, and by recognizing this relationship, one can appreciate both vulnerability and the potential for change. The author expresses a desire to interrogate and understand identity and faith through creative expression, ultimately suggesting that transformation, both cosmic and personal, is a fundamental aspect of existence.

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Curiosity about the natural world

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and a desire to delve into our human condition motivated

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this poetry collection.

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The book was first sparked by looking to the natural world

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for patterns

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and purpose, to explore how it connects to

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false human beings and to the divine.

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As it happened, I was just starting to write these poems

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during the beginning of the pandemic, during the lockdown,

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which only increased my longing for wide open spaces

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and the world of the physical universe.

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Uh, so the poems of this collection reached from the bottom

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of the ocean to the land, to the edges of outer space.

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And although they are expansive in scope,

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they often end up describing a very intimate interior space.

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I think, the poems is charting the vast multiverse,

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yet simultaneously mapping the interior of the human being.

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Um, an example of this could be the poem, heart

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as Sipho.

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So a sipho is a long colonized sea creature think

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kind of really long seas snake, called the spore.

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Uh, so this poem is about that creature,

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yet it's also saying something about the human heart.

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So I'd like to read, heart as spore.

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The researchers had imagined it whip saw through

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silty sleeves, the giant spore sea worm

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of such ghostly fiber and link.

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It would take hours just to watch it pass

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thriving blue bioluminescence skin of it simultaneously

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here and far now they witness it,

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photograph it, stare the improbable slithering

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150 foot figment

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ribbon in a quantum state, the floating bell

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of head so distant from the end

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of its colonized chambers

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that the steadiness steers far from the fret

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sting, jostle, and the eerie suck and ripple of its path.

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Now prior Dubia leap

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and swim forward with sureness now wind

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sideways and uncertain fatigue.

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The head arrives in an Australian oceanic canyon

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while the tail trails in a different time zone,

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so far from true cadence of itself.

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Two places at once there

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the water glows aqua

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In your presence.

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And here the long thin muscle still heaving,

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reaching along the night, drench bottom.

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In the course of writing this collection,

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I became a little obsessed with Nebula.

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Nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas

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and outer space where new stars form,

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but it also typically results from a supernova, which

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as you probably know, is the death of a star.

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So for me, Nebula was a contradiction.

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It kind came to represent this nexus

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of death and new life.

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Um, construction and reconstruction or just change.

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There are thousands of classified neli in the universe.

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Um, but I picked just 12, to, include as poems.

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I I wrote about them in, butterfly Nebula,

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and they kind of stud the narrative arc

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or journey of the book.

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The title poem, butterfly Nebula, captures that sense

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of transformation that is at the heart of the collection.

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So I'd like to read that for you.

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Um, this is Butterfly Nebula.

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A stellar death must herald it.

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The hottest star throws off its envelope, chorus

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of dust eaten and wretched all its life.

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Two violent jets of gases.

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Over 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit

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must rip across space, many heavy light years

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out from under tightened belt of the body,

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dark slit running through the waist, a disc

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of weight, a thumb of the divine hees,

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the butterfly almost to severing

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the thing about a resurrection.

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The chrysalis must cleave

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expel the lifeblood, damp, crushed wings.

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At first unrecognizable,

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the Magdalene looked in all the wrong places.

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She thought he was the gardener.

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The split apart vowels of her name uttered

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unfold across constellation, stretching,

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stream of ultraviolet radiation

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making passed off skin of the dead star

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glow and two arching nebular lobes.

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It's new form, still gathering

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Energy. The

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collection is very rooted in the natural world,

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that speaks to who we are as human beings, which

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for me includes our relationship with the divine.

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What lies beyond our grasp, be it cosmic or spiritual?

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I think it's possible to know ourselves better

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by examining the world around us and all it's amazing

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and intricate beauty

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and understanding ourselves as a part of it.

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We often, I think anyway, lose sight of that

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and think of ourselves as separate.

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You know, we're kind of observing it separate from it.

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Um, but we're, we're actually really an integral part of it.

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We're woven right into the fabric of it.

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Um, so I think, by seeing ourselves as a part

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of this landscape of things that are always evolving,

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we can appreciate both our frailty

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and also our capacity for agency and change.

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We can choose to have a mindset, a purpose and renewal.

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Uh, these poems are fascinated with the tearing down

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of things, but also the building up of new things.

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They love to ask the questions,

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what is this thing becoming?

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When is it the new thing? Will we recognize it?

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You kind of hear that in the last poem I read

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that The New Butterfly is at first almost unrecognizable.

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A lot of the poems

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and this collection play with these questions.

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Um, and another poem that serves kind of as a, of an

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an example of will we recognize it.

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One thing becoming another is fear

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as absent mountain lion.

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When the poem begins, we hear from a speaker who is fearful

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because of a roaming mountain lion, which she cannot see.

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But by the end of the poem,

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the mountain lion becomes present,

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but within the speaker herself, Mrs.

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Fear as absent mountain lion

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at the trailhead, the hand lettered cardboard sign,

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large mountain lion sided here yesterday.

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At this time, he alert.

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This is my trail back of my hand,

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but my eyes race up the foothills home grasses

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and scrub odds of feline caution

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or boldness shift

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and shadow my own soft

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deliciousness weighed.

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I walk in a landscape of unanticipated pounce

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and claw risk crouching on the ridge

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here, the peak of every stopping countered

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By the steady pant of every perseverance.

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Purple fix on the wild, lavender

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and sage yellow skimm of finch

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and cottontail through chaparral crunch

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of free terrain, my slow

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loping muscle gambling sinew hunger

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set loose across the dust.

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So questions of faith

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and identity come into this conversation in the book

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around the tearing down in the building

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of another poem in the collection

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that looks at deconstruction

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and reconstruction of a thing

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with the Alicia Sea slug, which is a fascinating creature.

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And this poem offers a glimpse, into some of the,

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the faith themes that show up in the book.

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Uh, the epigraph of the poem is from the book of Ezekiel.

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I will give you a new heart

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and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies,

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your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts.

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This is the Alicia

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Sea Slug things go sideways.

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The body opens the wrong doors.

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And lets, in bad company, popa pods that take over,

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then we carry it segments crippled with parasites.

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Stony growth, I think you mean it when you say

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you'll give me a new heart.

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I see evidence in stars in the sea slug

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that can detach its entire disease body

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and crawl away on orange porn antenna

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the head births a new form.

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Mangled sea stars and flatworms do this,

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but only the Alicia Sea slug routes a heart

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from just ahead.

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This is your prescription.

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You pry loose the, the cargo

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and craft fresh strands of light.

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When I unhook all the parts

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and struggle away, won't you come rebuild,

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tear down the years the locusts have eaten.

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Let the heavy consignment fall regenerate

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the glistening wholeness from only one piece.

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Let that piece be you.

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What kind of spiritual contradiction

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that the book considers is the negative way

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or the via negativa, which is a theology that asserts

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that the transcendent God is

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beyond human knowledge. So the idea

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Is, although we can know something about God through

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creation, God is ultimately unknowable.

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So even as we can enter into relationship with God,

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we approach an unknowing.

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I like looking to the natural world to find hints about how

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to advance along this path of darkness.

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Um, and I've done that.

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I did it in my previous poetry collection,

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litany of flights.

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There are a couple poems in there and in butterfly nebula.

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Um, there are several poems, that draw on this theme.

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Also. To me, spiritual darkness is a paradox.

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It may seem like nothing is happening

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and yet transformation is happening.

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It's there all along.

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Um, very like a new moon we might miss in the darkness

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of the night sky.

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Um, so the next poem I'd like to share with you is

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via New Moon.

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Why do I want the moon, which belongs to you?

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Why do I drive against the foothills like a maniac

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to moon hunt when it's gone missing?

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I don't understand what's happening to my physics.

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I might need to live in a tent for a month

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away from streetlights and other blazes.

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I might need a blade, need to cut my hair

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and nails to slimmest crescent

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and solve for white pleated wings of moth

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sprung hole from phases just

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to die for light.

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You've packed up the knot moon tonight,

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A hanging promise, your light will come

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go barefoot and the drought powdered dirt

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press hard against the hole of cocoon.

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The strongest sit in the dust unknowing, the strongest

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linger in the bind weight

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for faintest sliver emerge.

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So another kind of contradiction present in the book is

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found in the physical universe itself.

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Um, I mentioned one example that a supernova,

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which is the death of a star, may result in the nebula,

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which may also then result in new stars.

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That paradoxical tension between death

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and new life is a key con contradiction that kind

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of flows throughout, the poems.

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It's found in the physical universe

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and in several faith traditions,

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however you name it, metamorphosis,

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resurrection, transformation.

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And our world and universe are full

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of these things in constant transition, which both science

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and faith observe.

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We see this pattern of regeneration in cycles in the sea,

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on the land and also in space.

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But typically in space, it's over vast distances

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and on a completely different, size scale and timescale.

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And sometimes I think that kind

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of distance helps us perceive things more clearly.

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A star system or a supernova

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or a nebula is just otherworldly enough, just vast enough,

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just strange enough, yet also just real enough

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for gr it to be a useful lens for our own realities.

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So as an example,

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Kepler observed a supernova in 1604.

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And today we can only observe the aftermath, the remnant

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of the supernova.

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And I love thinking about this in terms of the question

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of when that's the thing which has broken apart

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or changed, be it cosmic object

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or living being, when does it become a new thing, Mrs.

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Kepler's supernova remnant?

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Maybe the remnant tells the whole story.

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Maybe the shattering says the wanting.

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And we just can't see the we in its visible form,

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the unleashed dazzle of matter, not debris,

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but a new creation.

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What remains?

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Our senders come together burning through time

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and space complete, even

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as the fusion arrives and gnarls the universe

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and appears to be an expulsion from cell,

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the astronomers trace the cataclysmic losing

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of matter into space, not by not

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body, by body.

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And we know something about vast collapse

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that ignites expansion even here,

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even in the fragile mass of the animal heart,

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which must fisure in order to love.

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