I wonder sometimes whether or not we as Latter-Day Saints hold the content of personal revelation too sacredly. By that I actually mean, too privately. It’s true, there are many spiritual experiences that I certainly believe are designed to be a personal guide strictly for self, family, and close friends. I have had these experiences before, and shared them with few. However, I feel that there are many experiences that while privately revealed, are absolutely meant to be openly declared to anyone and everyone who will hear.
I had one of these experiences last year, and I only shared it in full with my friend David. Somehow, I felt like no one else would realize the depth that the experience had in my heart. I regret feeling that way. I share it now because I am discontent in holding it privately. I want the desire I felt to fill you, in some capacity. I want the realization I felt to reach you. I wish to know if and how you have been affected with similar desires and realizations, that I may thereby come to relive and continuously feel the sense of unity which invigorated me at that time.
Spoiler Alert: This message is for Bradford. Yes, YOU, Bradford. Sitting there at work...reading my blog. Be warned that by continuing to read this you will officially be forfitting your chance to interpret my poem,"Cosmos in a Workshirt," as I am about to unveil its meaning.
It begins with a man, which, a few of you may agree, I am entirely too preoccupied with. If any of you have ever wondered why I especially love Ralph Waldo Emerson, you get to learn more about that today. The simplest answer is: I feel he connects me to the rest of the world.
I remember the day that I bought my simple edition of some of his most popular essays. I had just begun to read the first essay, History, before my geology class, and I felt with a sudden sureness what I had never actually known before. History is really not about the past. It is about me, and the world around me. The same conflicts, emotions, and resolutions of purpose from the past are ongoing today. We rejoice in certain stories and events because there is something true and living about them. And as time goes along and we change, we identify with new writers and people. People like us-- more like ourselves than words on a page or ancient works of art lead us to believe. The past can have a likeness to our lives that feels almost akin to personal memory. This epiphany could have come in any number of ways, but it came through Ralph Waldo Emerson, after at least a year of college, through a book that cost me less than two dollars.
Not only did the ideas Emerson presented fill me with such happiness as this, but reading the words themselves reminded me of one of my closest friends in the world, David Moser. When he came home from his mission, I sent him a copy of this book of essays, with an inscription. I remember that I had told him that whenever I was in need of self-discovery, I returned to this book, and that whenever I returned to this book, I was somehow reminded of him. The first real connection—I found my friend in those pages when I was initially looking to learn more about myself. I felt we were both in there, in the same words. Little did I know, through reading Emerson, I was in store for much more than that connection.
About two years ago, I purchased a biography about Ralph Waldo Emerson called Emerson: The Mind on Fire. In it, I came across the story of a dream that Emerson once had, that thereafter served as one of the most powerful metaphors in his writing, which he would draw back on time and again. He describes it briefly:
“I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.”
This dream, this image, became absolutely fascinating to me. It was so powerful. I wanted the same dream. The same revelation. But I also wanted it to feel personal, somehow. I wanted to sense that sort of literal connection with the world, to know what it felt like to take it in, to be strengthened by it. I wanted to experience this vision for myself. Believing that I had as much right to these impressions as Emerson, or any other great mind in history, I decided to pray for it. After all, it was a good desire. Though I pleaded for it, I can’t say I honestly expected it. Despite that, as surely as I had asked, I received an answer.
An odd fact came into my mind randomly one day, which I learned from reading in my meteorology text book. I recalled having read that the number of molecules in a breath of air is the same as the number of known stars in the universe. Suddenly, a distinct image came into my mind of myself surrounded by a miniature scale of the universe. And as I took a breath, all of the stars, planets, galaxies and beyond were coming into my body and filling my lungs. It was amazing! I felt full of extraordinary energy and light. I immediately knew that there was a connection beyond the scale and scope of the world in store for me to fully realize.
This image took a universe that I knew to be billions of years old, and larger than I could fathom, and let it pass in and out of my lungs within the duration of a simple breath. I felt that an individual soul was so much more valuable, undoubtedly more beautiful, and vastly more eternal than everything else that exists. In considering the limited grasp I had of how grand and incomprehensible the universe is, I knew more than I ever had in my life, at that moment, what was meant by, “the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.”
As I mentioned a few entries ago, it was during the time I was in the mood to write poems that I decided to share some of my personal experiences with more people. So, I ended up writing a poem that relates this event:
That apple-sized world seized my fascination;
I wanted to dream it, hold it, eat it- possess it.
I might have asked, “How dare I crave that nourishment
That enlivened the likes of his prophetic mind?”
If I had not known him well enough.
The pages of his History,
Stone tablets, the width of perpetuity!
Each character carved deep. Each one repeats.
I own his mind? He mine? that apple is as good as mine.
I prayed for the invitation of his angel,
“This must thou eat.”
The same visitation-- unique.
For I wanted to feel the world, in me.
Though ardently I asked, I never thought
To see this image come to pass.
God must have had a love-filled laugh
When that joy struck, and bloomed…
To fill my lungs—ten to the power of twenty-two!
That is the number, more or less,
Of molecules within a breath.
Not of that alone, but also this,
The stars in all the skies.
This fact itself, coincidence, just
Worthy of footnote in my science text.
Till God let me watch and feel those stars
Gather inside my chest.
O, how I will outlast you, Night! Your lights go out
Within the time it takes me to exhale.
How beautiful you are, I know-
Yet compared with me, a brief faint glow!
My Emerson, I dare say this gift exceeds your dream
Of one mere apple eaten - the rest high in the trees.
Though with it in you, and you in me,
You’ll come to it at last. You’ll come to taste
Another world, afloat, eager to be grasped.
Even now, the world is bleeding,
That is an incredible song! The emotion he puts into it is overwhelming. I really am quite moved by the phrase, “beautiful drowning." I feel I know just what he means by it!
Anyway, this just isn’t the sort of experience you tell your friends about at parties. I don’t know how to share moments like these, the kinds that keep me believing in myself, and in the world, and in the power of prayer. I’d like to know how to revive this feeling from day to day. I want to hear about how those around me have come to discover this feeling. I want to urge those that don’t know personally where they fit in and connect with everything around them (with me, with you, with the past, with the future) to find a way. I’d like to think that all it takes is a spark, that they can keep feeding until they get a flame. Until the mind that connects us all is “the mind on fire.”
