Gloria in excelsis

I speak, but I don’t know who is listening.
I am here, but I don’t know who is watching.
I look, but I don’t know what I’m seeing.
I listen, but I don’t know who I’m hearing.

I act because I believe in humanity. I act because I believe in human beings. I act because human beings are animals, part of a planetary family, connected to all other living creatures through the strands of our DNA, through the currents of our water and air, through the Earth’s rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun.

The light of that sun shines down upon us each day of our lives. Whether we consider those days good or bad, whether the light is filtered through storm clouds or streams full upon our faces, it marks time out into patterns, into rhythms that govern our lives, and the lives before and after in countless generations.

This is a time of darkness.

But we know that the days shorten before they lengthen again.
The trees lose their leaves before they grow them again.
We lose our way before we find it again.
We pass from this life before life continues on again.

And when the long days of this Earth draw to their end and our planetary home passes from existence as it surely will, what will life have been but the glory of the universe calling itself into consciousness? And my one infinitesimal speck of that glory calls out to me across the vastness of time:

I’m listening.