PRIMAL SACRAMENT

From "War and Peace," I remember only one passage: Prince Andrei, blown up by a shell at Austerlitz just as he was observing an absurd argument between two soldiers over a mop: "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn...how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky. How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last!"

It was a life-changing perspectival shift.

Out of a nearly 1,000-page tome I always remembered Prince Andrei lying wounded on a bloody battlefield in total silence (probably blown temporarily deaf) gazing in rapture and peace at the expanse of blue sky above (thus war and peace coinciding at the same moment within the same person).

When I remembered that scene yesternight, I recalled Schweikert's epiphanic and synoptic gaze back to the whole of the blue-marble gem Earth.

The two humans in different centuries gazing outward/inward to Earth as home--and really to/into themselves as Earthbeings. One, Andrei, hugs a portion of Earth. The other, Schweikert, wants to give Earth-Home a motherly embrace.

The conceptual blending occurs as each understands himself as a integral part of a whole. Therein lies the experience of the Primal Sacrament.