"Anyone can cut an apple open and count the number of seeds. But who can look at a single seed and count the trees and the apples?"-Dottie Walters

I smile to myself as I write the title of this page. "Hmm," I wonder, "Will the reader think I am saying we are not alone in the universe, that flying saucers and little green Martians abound, that I am a UFOer?" I will tell you, I have not ruled it out.

I have a picture of "several hundred galaxies never before seen" as captured by the Hubble telescope. There are approximately one hundred billion stars in one galaxy-and then this new looking glass shows us several hundred of these collections of one hundred billion stars that no one knew was there. As I marveled over this picture, my father pointed out to me that the picture only showed one tiny keyhole portion of the night sky, and that the camera could be pointed in any other direction for three hundred sixty degrees and find stars and galaxies ad infinitum. "Billions and billions" of stars, as Carl Sagan said. Infinity.

Infinity: boundless, countless, endless, eternal, everlasting, incalculable, incomprehensible. I grasp at the fringes of the idea, a blind woman trying to imagine a painting. How vast is this void in which we hang suspended, tiny bits of flotsam in the cosmos sea. My mind creaks open to the possibilities of existence in other star systems, other dimensions, other times. Alternate realities. Imagination soars outward, yet balks finally at the enormity of the task. My thoughts fall back to Earth, the one teeming ball of life I know.

It doesn't matter if we are alone in the Universe or not. What is important is that we are not alone on the planet. Whatever you believe about the Universe and its inhabitants, the congregation of beings with which you exist collectively on this globe have primary importance for you. Each individual can do very little alone but exist, and sometimes not even that. Yet together we can build communities, cities, airplanes, space shuttles, telephones, computer networks, pyramids, and Eiffel Towers. We write books for others to read, produce food for others to eat, manufacture cars for others to drive.

I believe there is meaning and purpose to life, and the clues are hidden in other people. Search them out, it's a monster jigsaw puzzle-and it's fun. The answers are not for you to discover alone in a void; if it were so, we would all be on our own little individual planets-with instruction books, tapes, and videos. There are certainly enough planets to go around. We are here together for a reason. Your purpose in life is to figure out what that reason is. And every other person here is your teacher.

Today's Affirmation: "I celebrate the wonders of the Universe and my place in it!"