Reflections

Writing about the ocean’s surface reflecting the sunlight and the stars brought to mind something that has tantalized me for weeks – something I noticed when I was trying focus on being in the Present but not trying to notice anything in particular.

Every morning I get up early – before sunrise at this time of year in Florida – and make coffee. I use one of those old Bodum vacuum coffeemakers that basically consists of two glass globes. When the stove heats the water in the lower globe it rises into the upper globe where the coffee grounds are waiting, stays up there long enough (after the stove is turned off) to brew the coffee, and then descends as coffee to the lower globe leaving the exhausted grounds in the top globe. I love the way the whole thing is done by Nature – that and there being no paper filter.

I was using the glass globes as my focal point for Now while the water heated, when I suddenly became aware that the shiny globes were reflecting things from all over the kitchen. They were like small kitchen universes – ceiling and counter lights, refrigerator, cupboard doors, knife rack – all there on the curved glass.

From there I waked up to the reflections all over the kitchen. It seemed that everything in my consciousness was a reflection. Many shiny surfaces reflected clear images of objects, but even the duller surfaces reflected light in one way or another. I could see my glass globes in the small handles of cupboards. Everything seemed to bounce from everything else, as if Reality were all reflections.

It surprised me that I’d never noticed or thought of reflections in that way before. I had taken them for granted in the way that one takes for granted and may overlook the most obvious thing in botany and biology – bilateral symmetry.

There seems to be some hidden, important, meaning in reflections as I newly perceived them. I’m still pondering what that meaning is, where it is leading me, where it might lead anyone. There is a secret here.

I have no answer, but I keep recalling the book, THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE, by Michael Talbot (1991). There may be some connection with the mystery in reflections. Leafing through the book I find these lines:

“Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote. . .”


“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”

William Blake, “Augeries of Innocence”