Every twilight over the distant S.F. Bay horizon is different, luckily gorgeous these days, including a single star, bright in the high west, like a message—but we know it’s Venus. Yet, it’s another planet millions of miles away there, visible here.

After twilight, the array of other points in the black pointillism is sparse, due partly to nearness of city lights; but even high in the mountains, the truly amazing array is relatively sparse, the heaven’s diffuse population. But the galaxy is so large that an accurate portrait (a scientific illustrator’s rendering) looks dense. The scale of things is impossible to appreciate, as some of the “stars” in our black sky are other galaxies in a tissue of galaxies of a universe possibly among multiple universes.

If Earth’s life is not ultimately a story of lonely hearts in the cosmos (i.e., there is more to life than Earth’s), the Others evidently must leave us to figure it out our own way, i.e., relative to our own evolving.

The genius in our form of life is to have found enough intelligent fun, fruitfulness, and fulfillment that we are now what we are, not merely getting along like life generally, but going our own way in the black cosmos, largely doing well (given the exponential rate of our impatient evolving): self-mirroring through gods, aspirations, appreciations, and designing our way. This is what we are, whatever the reason: there being this form of life that can appreciate itself as, in, and to horizons of conceivability. (Actually, really, life is a miraculous accident, like the consequential appearance of a Shakespeare or Einstein or Mahler, etc.—yet, for a species with abundant prospects for accident in a galaxy with apparently-abundant prospects for life).

The wide opening toward the Bay at my vantage in the Berkeley hills is framed by trees where sparrows flutter back and forth, chasing each other, apparently in ambivalence about where to sleep tonight (always the same general options), but what the hell: Being chased through the air is more fun than choosing.

Someone’s kitty on the wooded trail back from there suddenly sees something unexpectedly move in the grass and rears up, paws in the air, thrilled by the advent, like a child faced by the sudden miracle of a new toy moving, wide-eyed, maybe hands flying back in the thrill.

Love those endorphins. (Maybe flying is orgasmic.) Better: Love the complex pleasures of capability to find memorable enthrals, florescence in complex music, complexes of taste, poetic overtones, intimate entwinements. And love the paths to their being, love portents as much as endings (implying more chances).

Or what about living each chance as if it’s the last, like someone on the other side of near death. Or a very old soul waking to realize one more day thankfully.

The prospect is available to anyone.

So, people’s claims about ultimate meaninglessness evidently imply exhaustion of all the options for homemaking, interior design, books, gardening, and style (so many modalities; material wealth is not generally required); music, books, film, and other arts (so many modalities; not expensive to be richly enjoyed); cuisine (modalities), restaurants (modalities; OK: expensive) and books; dinner parties (ditto; get a neighborhood); adventure trekking (urban safaris included), books, traveling (generally; amazing how nearby can be an adventure), sailing (it’s a metaphor), books, flying (especially mental enchantments of reading), and endless other good reasons to live. (My love of books is a matter of complementarity in active happiness, not bias for sedentary contemplativeness or voracious acquisitions for unread display at dinner parties.)

Obviously, there is the matter here of money (which amplifies the value of my bias for books: available through any library.) Actually, though, meaningfulness is not about money. Wealth of meaning brings happiness, not money (beyond a particular level, depending on one’s aspirations—but it’s all so complicated, isn’t it: all the massive poverty and suffering. But the poor do not lack aspiration, thus Meaning).

My high end play there is about the ease of coming up with things for tangible aspiration that aren’t vacuous or consumerist or unhealthy. Claims about Meaninglessness are philosophically vapid; it’s a matter for psychotherapy (a very good thing).

I’m being metonymic of appreciability. A narrative point can easily flower into something unmanageable for reasonable time. Indeed, thank goodness. But I don’t have catalogs of restaurants and music, etc. to offer here. I could.

At least, I didn’t run ahead too exuberantly, then lose you. O, wait a minute: You were ahead, and I was lost. Whatever. We lose and find, lose and find, like the sparrows.

Then sleep, perchance waking another day to prospects and projects, fantasy and creativity—the savoring, be it felt or intellectual (and both!), exuberant or sensual—like we imagined in the beginning, still ongoing, thank you.

O, that’s not you? That’s how writing gone public goes: for overhearing, ultimately to godknowswho. To them, I write you.

So, love the ambiguity, my allusiveness about what’s ours, your chance to entertain yourself, to make the following a resonance that may be generative. All the better we are inasmuch as we can love a high sensibility for large scalarity of appeal, i.e., our potential for that, always there as long as we’re alive. Love as you can elations presaging some literary comprehension of high humanity that has progressive efficacy.

I revere our potential for the ecstatic quotidian instilling a veritable Eros of opening (exuberances of curiosity) into generative gravities of mystery, as if intelligibility as such, in itself, might be discerned, surely for its own sake, yet mirroring our potential, thereby being ours.

Short of that (yet no less savoring idealization), I love the efficacy of appreciability we are so far, as wholehearted capability still growing, especially when we can educe others’ and things’ potential through our findings.

Next: learning for teaching in flourishing.