This is my take on spirituality, from a post I made soon after I came to the Zone and which I repeat here for those who missed it. My apologies to those who have already read it. It opens with a quote from Rachel Carson, one of my favorite human beings of all time, a scientist and a poet, and a person of deep but unconventional spirituality. She is credited with starting the environmental movement almost single-handedly with her book "Silent Spring" about corporate pesticide abuse, but she wrote primarily about the sea and its creatures. She was born and spent most of her childhood in Springdale, Pa, just two blocks from where my wife lived when I met her. This quote is the closing paragraph of a field guide she wrote on the seashore life of the North American Atlantic coast.

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us -- a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself."

From The Edge of the Sea
- Rachel Carson (1955)

The poetry of Genesis is more of a genuine creation than the tribal and medieval theology of origins that inspired it; and the landscape revealed by even a cursory knowledge of biology (not to mention astronomy and physics) shows us a world of incomparably greater richness, mystery and wonder than the superstitious nonsense we have manufactured to comfort ourselves. The universe the scientists have discovered is simply more convincing, and certainly more beautiful, than the one the priests invented, and in its contemplation lies the true meaning of spirituality.