Whole Way Home

There's more known about space than Earth's oceans. It's why we put such weight in the color of eyes rather than the texture of hands. It's why poets lose their emotions in things like the weather, and fall in & out of love between sunrises & sunsets.

And space sits there with its legs crossed, chewing on the raw end of a cigar, in a wrinkled velvet smoking jacket, stained milky white, with balls of lint collected under the arms and loose tobacco leaves falling out of the sleeves.

It's space that is in all of the Hollywood blockbusters, laughing its vacuum-like laugh, and posing for photographs on the red carpet, accepting awards at prestigious ceremonies and giving long, eloquent speeches about mankind's journey to find God in the deep, dark corners of the solar system.

But if God is God, then surely He can be found at the bottom of the ocean, along with our lost car keys and dropped phones and misplaced letters and broken cameras. Surely He is there, side by side with the kind of pressure that breaks, that puts cracks in our hulls and hearts, and floods water with water.

Because if God is God, then He was there, way back when, when the whole world moved without eyes to watch it move, back when we first dragged ourselves, muddied & dirty, out of His body, onto the shores and breathed and coughed, exhausted and drained, just to look up and see the stars.