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Close to the Truth
by Jim Culleny

In the old days we aligned rocks to reckon the equinox, a la Stonehenge, as if spring were some kind of stupendous event. What else could compel us to devise methods to lift 25 ton stone pillars over our heads with mere pulleys, ropes, and elbow grease? That’s a lot of trouble just to be able mark the exact moment the sun finds its midpoint on its way to solstice. Gimme a break. From a twenty-first century point-of-view, doesn’t that seem a little quaint? But should it?

There was a time, too, when many of us imagined the sun was moved by Helios, a cool charioteer executing a sizzling global semi- circumnavigation. Helios, with amazing endurance and regularity, was thought to haul a very intense load of heat and light from horizon to horizon without even getting his hair singed. And this was way before sun-block. The guy could definitely have used a cool one.

But none of this seems so far-fetched when compared to other stories. What’s so absurd about an airborne charioteer hauling exploding hydrogen everyday like clockwork compared with the current notion that we’re all held in an invisible web (called space), latticed with particle (or is it wave-like?) spandrels of a mysterious force called gravity, which coalesces now and then and here and there to form... stuff ? As mathematically valid as this may be, what, exactly, does it tell us? Not much. And this is not even getting wound up in String Theory.

It seems everybody’s got their own angle on the situation. The way mathematicians put it, it’s all just numbers. Particle physicists give odds it’s all probability. Fundamentalists judge it all right or wrong. While Zen Buddhists can't make up their minds if it's all or nothing. So what if they’re all right? The point is, does it get us any closer to the truth, or does it just make the world ripe for prozac? Like us, I think the builders of Stonehenge must have believed in a magical cosmos. They just weren't so coy about expressing it.

But we were talking about spring, and whatever else spring may be, it's a celebration of life; and we haven’t stroked or stacked enough numbers yet to confidently explain what that is. But, after many millions of years, not only are we still working on it, we’re tinkering with it.

Finally though, spring is when my wife begins nursing her garden. She works hard at this and, starting in May, produces a beautiful gift for all who see it from then until October, when it disappears. In May I see her out blending with her flowers, sweating out weeds and loving her blossoms, foxglove and alyssum. Pat’s garden is a luminous
expression of life that'll never be reduced to numbers --I don’t care who’s doing the programming. And what's more, there are other things that will not survive numeric translation --like eating. Digitize that.

When push comes to shove words and numbers often fail. That’s why we have mystics. Mystics try to fill in the gaps. They speak in conundrums. Or they slap us upside the head hoping to dispel the idea that our illusions are the points of our lives. Or do we all just want to be millionaires?

I hope not. In fact, sometime in summer, a million miles away from a million bucks, on a day when old Helios once again ferries fire through the blue in his celestial U-Haul, and while strange forces still hold us to the earth, Pat and I sit on a swing and admire her garden. That’s about as close to the truth as I get.