“We know, of course, that the visible world is composed of protons, neutrons and electrons that combine to form atoms of different elements, and we know those elements are the building blocks of the planets and stars that give rise to solar systems and galaxies.

What we didn’t know until very recently, however, is that those protons, neutrons and electrons appear to form less than 5 percent of the universe, and questions remain about how these building blocks arose.  If regular matter represents only a small slice of the universe, what is the rest of the universe made of?” –  excerpt from Through the Wormhole

“Relax, ” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive.

You can check-out any time you like,

But you can never leave.”

– Hotel California, Eagles

My finished painting doesn’t look quite as dark as the image above makes it out to be.  Then again, I’ll grant you that might be my own little delusion.

Suffice it to say, it feels lighter somehow.

The painting morphed with each visit to my studio. It started off by growing darker and darker, and then, it began shifting to include gleams of light and brightness. It seemed to represent a far-off piece of night sky.

At its darkest I thought it was finished and I decided to call it Kathleen’s Dying.

Slowly the brightness grew and, finally, I added my photo of the motel sign and realized that the painting was resolved. It had become a cosmic motel and sported a new name, You Can Check Out…

It had become the ultimate motel, the one where we can always check out, but, as the Eagles remind us, we can never really leave.

Science tells us that we are made of the same stuff as stars. I know that we are energy, atomic and sub-atomic infinite dust. We are protons, neutrons, electrons but more importantly we are mostly immaterial, or at least, with the measuring devices we have available to us, we have discovered that there is more not-there than there.

We can call that consciousness, energy, or we can call it soul. It doesn’t really matter what words we use or what our belief systems are, there is some innate hunch that tells us there is more to all this than meets the eye. In fact, with all the powerful microscopes and telescopes, we now know that our eyes have never told us the whole truth at all.

I just have to spend a minute or two with some of these Hubble images to be forever humbled at all that I don’t know. Too, I can see powerful microscope images and get completely flummoxed at all that is going beneath what I think I see. The more I read and think these pretzel-thoughts, the more I recognize that, in the grand scheme of things, well…seriously, it’s a pretty grand scheme and what could I possibly know or not know?

However. I do know that love exists. Perhaps our purpose is to simply clarify and magnify our love for each other. We all know about love. It moves mountains, stands in the way of hate and intolerance, protects children and compassionately ushers the dying to their new worlds. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And yet, love is immeasurable.

Perhaps one day an uber-microscope will tell us what we already intuitively know, that all our sub-atomic particles are spinning in concert together, connected by the most powerful and infinite force in the world – love.

Love is always the answer, and love, my friends, never dies.

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet…everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” – Neils Bohr, Danish physicist.