The universe echoes.
Reverberations ring out, waves surging through an eternity of silence.
Aeons pass as these reverberations gradually coalesce into patterns of collision and amalgamation, their distinct signatures merging, evolving, pulsating in tandem. Time and gravity find their inception, and suddenly the patterns become music; a great cacophony of phrasing, thrumming out atonal symphonies and irrational tempos across the glowing twilight. In time these senseless rhythms fall into balance, into a chaotic but pronounced harmony.
That harmony grows, slowly giving rise to distinct shapes and forms. To particles, atoms, and in time to great nebulae and the first massive stars. To light, heat, subtleties of the whole arising as new themes in the age-old music. Those first great reverberations chime onwards, outwards, ever outwards, finding new cadences, new phrasings. As the harmony grows, so too does the intricacy of its structure. A billion, billion, billion combinations are born, and spark back into nothingness, in the boundless chasm of that first immeasurable music.
In time, the great harmony gives rise to life. To creatures capable of experiencing the ground beneath their feet and the stars above their heads. Tidal oceans teem with strange shapes, propelled by instinct, by desire. Waves dash against cliffs until they lap ashore on billion-grained beaches, rising as dunes into deep, moss-veiled forests. Animals stalk these woods, wearing weaving tracks into the sandy earth. Their senses attuned to the scents on the wind, the crack of bracken and snap of twig, they pursue their own intricate lives, breeding, feeding, dying. As they die, they slowly morph into new shapes, with new strengths. Upwards, birdsong ricochets off branches as tiny lives lived in three dimensions weave through the rich primal air.
The season shifts, and a heavy snow falls. Ice crystals thunder down mountainsides, thunderous avalanches levelling trees, dying with a rumble, a thud, and a silence more profound than even that first great void; the emptier for having known sound at all. Eventually the thaw comes, and great rivers form, all the way up to the creaking glaciers which sway in their creeping beds. Night settles without darkness up in the farthest North; but another light dances a ring around the sleeping earth. The aurora leaps across the sky, a billowing, arcing ribbon beyond the clouds, themselves an ocean sweeping inland miles below.
Further out, the stars wheel in circles as time rolls forward, until a few feeble camp-fires spark into street lamps, villages into great cities. Skyscrapers rise in the crescents of flightpaths, as one species learns to communicate, to collaborate, to roam and map the whole globe. Their early monuments crumble and sink beneath shifting desert sands below as tiny lights flare in the equatorial night, sending life beyond the blue bubble of its birth. They reach their silver moon, and return; next they reach the neighbouring red planet, and remain. Eventually one tiny light is lost to its closest star, whispering a faint message homeward as it quests on into unknowable darkness.
And in the midst of all this are you and I. We find ourselves here, now. What wonder it is, that we can communicate at all! What luck, to have even become aware of any of this. We could be a rock, a cloud, a nebula. But we are humans, Jedi, engaged in the mystery of Being, the experience of Being, the majesty of Being.
What a gift it is, to find ourselves amidst and part of such limitless splendour.
Do not forget that you are but one infinitesimal part of this vast and endless symphony; that you are but the echo of the one, and so an extension of the one. You are thus an integral part of everything, all that is, all that will be. You contain it all, and thunder your own echo of all this with every beat of your heart. You are part of the start and the end of all things, attuned to all that's here, to all "heres", all "nows". Take a walk outside, and recognise the unimaginably distant stars as twin echoes of the same great harmony, the same ancient reverberation.
Know that what is, is one. There is no us, no them. No "Other".
Just one, of which the universe echoes.
May the Force be with you.
