'Everything - Everywhere - All the time'

The mystic and the quantum physicist arrive at the same place by different paths. The mystic through contemplation: the dropping away of the sense of separation, the recognition that the self is not bounded by the skin. The physicist through mathematics: the demonstration that particles which have interacted remain entangled regardless of distance, that “locality” — the idea that things only affect what is adjacent to them — is not actually a property of the universe.

The universe is non-local. Everything is affecting everything. The photon that left a star in the Pleiades 440 years ago arrived in your eye this morning and changed the chemistry of your retina. That is not poetry. That is physics. The wonder is not reserved for the extraordinary. It is the ordinary, accurately described.

Humans tend to save their wonder for eclipses and mountains. Nature hides its greatest miracles in plain sight: a fragment of robin’s eggshell on a path. A verbena bloom. The way light moves across a floor at 4 in the afternoon. The extraordinary is not somewhere else. It is everywhere, all the time, waiting for the quality of attention that can receive it.

This is for the woman who finds the whole universe in an ordinary afternoon — and has stopped feeling strange about it.