Some of my most robust contemplative practices occur outside the fold of the ordinary, particularly through mediums of art.

After watching Journey of the Universe, I felt an idea crop up linking to a line in Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” (We saw to the edge of all there is—/so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back) that sat at the borders of my mind like a thread I couldn’t grab hold of. So I started painting. The painting I created features a disembodied person with stark outlines, with color fading beyond the shape of a person. The same is true for Earth, and both Earth and the person bleed into deep black, flecked with stars: the Universe. This painting is a reflection of my own feeling of expanse, which I was the emotion/feeling I named after watching Journey of the Universe.

To me, it blurs the lines of distinction between “us” and “the universe,” but I didn’t set out to portray that meaning when I picked up my paint brush. I had to excavate my own feelings about both the film and the poem through a different medium before I could interpret what this feeling of “expanse” meant.

While not facilitated during our class time, this contemplative practice helped identify some of the thematic content I was struggling to contend with. I believe the distinction between humans, non-humans, the Earth, and the universe, is overstated; if we are all made of stardust, the distinctions between “us” and an “other” (regardless of what form that might take) become irrelevant. The contention between the boundaries our societies impose and my understanding of internal exapnsiveness has caused a great deal of internal conflict for me, which I experience through anxiety or forms of grief.

However, accessing the expanse within myself has offered me inroads to coping with my own fears around worsening global conditions and finding generative perspectives; knowing that the opportunities for know knowledge are so vast that it is impossible to capture them all has redirected where I pour my energy. If our existing lines of inquiry have gotten us this far with various disastrous results, I believe it’s time to open up a new avenue of knowledge—to sacrifice some things we hold as fact—to explore ways of being and existing that were either lost, destroyed, or entirely undiscovered.