WILD FAR-OUT WONDERINGS

It is hard for me to turn my attention away from all the beautiful sights, sounds and fragrances of June, but sometimes I feel I should think more deeply about really serious things and stop my flitting around like a carefree butterfly. So, for one whole hour I thought about the Black Hole. Not the Black Hole of Calcutta but the one somewhere way out in the universe that seems to be "eating up" stars, meteoroids, asteroids, planets and anything else passing close enough to its vortex to be sucked into it.

For a moment my mind goes off on a side road to wonder to what numerical power this Black Hole's sucking sound would exceed Perot's sucking sound from the south drawing in a major part of U.S. business.

But I return mentally to this gigantic Black Hole so many thousands of light years away scientists and astronomers, by way of the Hubble telescope, have discovered.

I try to imagine it. Is it like a tornado, only lying sideways or upside down from our viewpoint? Does it suck in planets and other heavenly bodies to grind them up and spew them out at the far end of the hole, or swallow them whole? A hole is a hole, isn't it? The first definition of a hole is an opening through which something passes, as in button hole, a hole in a pocket or, alas, a hole in a stocking? There has to be two openings, else it wouldn't be a hole, only a pit however deep it might be.

If this Black Hole swallows heavenly bodies, do they come out at some unfathomable length of vortex into an as yet undiscovered, unimagined place? Could this be the New Heaven and the New Earth? Does the Black Hole, having swallowed up every last thing, finally close, having no more "food?"

Does that Black Hole now extend long invisible tentacles to take away such people as Elijah, Enoch? Maybe others?

The simulated pictures they show on TV of how the Black Hole works is somewhat scary, but then if we're sucked into it to come out at some new place, would it not be only like everything being turned wrong side out, the Hole, having no more food sucks itself in and turns wrong side out? Maybe everything is wrong side out now and after being sucked in and through the vortex, everything would be right side out. A New Heaven? A New Earth?

Sounds like I've been chewing on opium poppies, doesn't it? Well, some of Coleridge's best writings were done after chewing a cud, sweetened with the milk of such poppies.

Another side road leads me off to think of the Bermuda Triangle where high flying things are reputed to have disappeared. Is this a tentacle of the forthcoming Big Black Hole?

Biblical John, on the Island of Patmos said, symbolically, he saw a new heaven and a new earth descending. Was he "dipping into the future, farther than human eye could see" and "seeing" all the new things coming out of the far end of the voracious Black Hole?

I wander out to look at my blooming red poppies which are not the opium species, hear the mother wren making anxious noises for her young nestlings nearby, see the neighborhood cat wandering through the yard, inhale the fragrance of the purple petunias, see that my tomato plants are blossoming and it all lies easy on my mind and gives me such a deep feeling of contentment, especially since I've done my stint at more far out (pun intended) serious thinking.

REJOICE!