Episode 205: The Spiritual Nature of All Things | A Conversation with Kaylee McElroy
“The natural world, with all its varieties of God’s creations, shows us so many [other] ways of being,” writes Kaylee McElroy. Zooming out as far as human imagination can take us may bring our ideas about God and our relationship to the physical world into clearer focus. In Episode 205, Susan and Cynthia are joined by Kaylee for a conversation about everything: structures, darkness, creation, connection, and the convergence of physics and spirituality.
Notes & Quotes:
The Spiritual Nature of All Things, by Kaylee McElroy, Exponent II blog, 5/3/2024
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli
Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, by Leonard Shlain
Midwest Pilgrims
Meditations on the Feminine Divine, by Kaylee McElroy, Exponent II blog, 4/27/2022
The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit
What Stars are Made of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, by Donovan Moore
The Fire of Stars: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars Are Made Of, by Kirsten W. Larsen
We Are Stardust: The Interconnection of All Things, by Barb Barton
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
You Belong: A Call for Connection, by Sebene Selassie
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men." —Albert Einstein
"The world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships." —Carlo Rovelli
"Myths enrich science, and science enriches myth." —Carlo Rovelli
“Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next….Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.” —Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (p. 185)
“The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species-affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of you head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.” —Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, (p. 3)
“We are all vibrating energy patterns made of the same kinds of atoms and connected to everything else through the history of the universe.” —Marcelo Gleiser