Universe

This poem speaks from the imagined perspective of the Universe.

The idea that we are expressions of the Universe experiencing itself is not a new one, but this poem offers a fresh, playful way of exploring it.

Beyond human distinctions of good and bad or right and wrong, the Universe simply exists—expressing the fullness of what it can be through everything within it.

The poem ultimately turns that perspective toward the individual, exploring a nondual possibility: that we are not separate beings contained within the Universe, but expressions of the same existence experiencing itself.

This poem plays with an idea I have returned to in many different forms: that perhaps the boundary between ourselves and the Universe is less absolute than it appears.

We naturally divide reality into categories: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Self and other. Me and Universe.

Many of those distinctions are useful—and some are essential for navigating human life—but I don't know that usefulness makes them fundamental properties of existence itself.

So I imagined what the Universe might say if it could speak.

I don't imagine it judging its own existence according to the categories we have created. It simply is. Stars form. Cells divide. Things emerge, transform, die, and become something else.

And we are part of that same process.

The second stanza takes that idea further:

“For you exist
Because I am you
To be Myself enthused”

The capitalization of “Myself” is intentional. The speaker has collapsed the distinction between Universe and individual. We are not merely in the Universe. In a very literal sense, we are it.

Really, the idea that we are one of the ways the Universe experiences itself is not inherently metaphysical: We exist within the Universe, we are made of the same matter and energy as everything else, and through our consciousness we experience the Universe. The statement is therefore, at least in this basic sense, axiomatically true.

That does not require us to believe that the Universe "intended" for us to exist or designed us for this purpose. It is simply a description of our position within reality: we are the Universe, in one of its many forms, experiencing what it is like to be here.

The more metaphysical dimension enters through the word “enthused.”

The word comes from the Greek entheos, meaning “filled with God.” That gives the final line a significance beyond simple excitement or delight. To be “Myself enthused” suggests the possibility of being filled with something divine—of encountering, expressing, or participating in something beyond the individual self.

That possibility remains open rather than asserted. The poem does not claim that the Universe has a conscious intention or that every human experience is divinely directed. Instead, it points toward an opportunity: perhaps in becoming fully ourselves, we can also become receptive to something larger than ourselves.

The Universe experiences itself through us as a matter of fact. Whether that experience can also become a meeting with the divine is a much more personal and mysterious question.