I made a little pond some years ago. There are plants and
tadpoles and goldfish and lots of other things in it. There’s water.
I am not the Creator of heaven and earth, but I think like
one some times.
And I have made people in my own image. That is I have
formed them from out of flesh and blood into the beings that live and breathe somehow
within my being. I don’t have the omniscience to know when one falls as
sparrows do from time to time, but so many people have become somebody for me.
They are not as the drops of rain or the grains of sand. They have names and
faces. I know them. They are like my children or my parents or my brothers and
sisters. Well, I have idealized these words, in a way. I was not actually very close
to my mother, for example, but yet we must have been very close in ways that I
don’t remember very well. She made me.
But I think that there is now a world of people partly of my
imagining who I feel close to as if we were family.
So many I could tell you about, yet they are also other, each their own person, not made
by me, real in ways I do not know.
But here is my part. I have imagined them to be part of me.
In some real ways I have created who they are in my mind.
This is a mystery for me and yet I know it as the bedrock
truth of my existence.
I step outside in the middle of the night and look up at the
stars – some brighter than others. So distant yet this one or that one enters
into my mind – if only its glittering light.
My world is not about fairness. I play favorites with
people. Some have become more important to me than others. Some people make my
heart ache in a way that I crave.
If there were a Creator as the biblical story speaks of, I
imagine that God would think of the beings that she had created and then had given
the freedom to be themselves. She would think of them often.
My own power is more circumscribed. My world is peopled with
beings who I have truly imagined into a form that exists only in my mind but
who are much themselves – like that star at one point of the constellation Cassiopeia.
My heart and my mind break. My universe shatters into
fragments. I cannot contain it all within my brain. Omniscience, omnipotence,
exceeds my grasp.
And so I let my feet trod the earth. I see and touch people.
I listen to our conversations. And let me tell you from out of my thoughts, one
by one, of the people who I know so very incompletely. And yet they seem so
very real in my mind. They exist – they live there – in a way that only I can
know. We share hints with each other, you and I, to be sure. But your world and
your people must seem different in your mind, perhaps.
That is part of what I have been trying to say.
You should not be surprised if I tell you that I truly know
so little of what I speak. And yet my life is somehow filled beyond bursting
with you and you and you.
But here it is: I know - as much as I can know anything - of
the countless longings in my heart.
I am the creator of one world. Almost all of everything else
– worlds without apparent end - was not made by me.
