I woke up and discovered that I am out of coffee. I must go to the coffee shop if I am to keep to my morning addiction and my ritual, and I intend on keeping them both. I am groggy and groan what I must do. I need to walk, down Burnside and up 21st to Coffee Time, a little less than a mile, about a 15 minute walk. 

 

Make the trip, a crossing of spacetime, distance and time, which is what we mean by reality.

 

We perceive space & time as separate dimensions (or as three dimensions plus one), but they are one and the same. Space and matter exist solid and only as a solid-matter-of-fact as of right now, the ever present now. When we think back, or when we project forward, we are looking from our perspective of right now out onto the landscape of spacetime. Our sight is dubious, particularly towards the future, which offers little of its own light of which we could perhaps see; instead we cast our light ahead, revealing a land of shadows, and thus opportunity. The past in contrast glows from our presence, though as we move away the light and the heat fade. Add to this that much of our perspective of the past is shaped from hearsay, non-experienced and thus secondhand information, given to us as light bouncing off 

mirrors, so the past looks like a house of mirrors (the conclusion that this is the inherited nature of all our societal knowledge). We privilege the four dimensions, I wonder if this mental construction blinds us from what is happening. But how else to see? And what could we be missing? 

 

I’d like to shine some light on the issue: light is a weird thing. Light is all electromagnetic-radiation, thus the wavelength does not effect the speed of light, so it will travel the same speed relative to the medium it is traveling in, maximized in empty space. It can travel in empty space; space is not empty of course, it is a giant ocean of light and heavier particles, or like a desert full of sand (stars like cacti, humans like bugs that live on a flower as it blooms at night). Light does not experience time. Makes no difference the distance, from our sun to our skin, or from the primordial CMB light that stretches to lengths of over 13 billion years to our telescopes; from the perspective of light, it was one instant. What is it like to be light? A cosmic now that gets smashed into a conglomeration of matter, ceasing and transforming momentum into fractured pieces that will specialize into other forms of energy and from sheer potential birth a new moment, like a child emerging out of the womb and then growing, evolving, deconstructing, cycling and recycling, until eventually .. hardening into an eternal rock of being like a planet thrown from its orbit with everything else in existence (space and time) expanding away faster than even the speed of light so that the ball rolls smoothly forever down the slope of eternity, like falling in an empty vacuum in no direction in particular // or perhaps a big bang and an explosion like fire with light released with the splendor of a Phoenix shaking off its ashes, a new new birth, the past an instantaneous moment gone, a cosmic now that stretches a new line.