Cathedral of the Mind

Ada’s mind wandered the universe as she walked home from work; her thoughts spiraled and bloomed into complex tendrils:

Dust, gas, and rocks collapse into each other, accreting matter over eons. Stars ignite, planets form, and eventually, if the conditions are right, life is born; Life driven to investigate the cosmos. 

On the largest scales, the universe takes shape in filamentary structures, webs of stars and galaxies and dark matter. On the smallest scales, particles vibrate and hum in relational configurations that form the tick, tick, tick of cause and effect, measuring the heartbeat of the universe, the weave of time. 

Ada lived an interior life of the mind and yet, she caught someone’s eye in passing and they traded smiles, a small exchange of energy across the fabric of spacetime. It lifted her mood. She was tired after a long day of labor, earning wages that kept her alive and conscious, able to probe the nature of existence. Her mind hummed as sensory information barraged her body, overwhelmed by all of the people moving through the world at the same discrete point in time.

She walked into her apartment and said hello to her mother and grandmother, to her younger siblings, and silently, to all those who’d lived there before. She grabbed a snack and flopped onto her bed with a big sigh, releasing the day’s imprint on her body, donning headphones to shut out the noise of the world so that she could open her mind to the wider universe. 

Ada closed her eyes as the rich melody of a cello and the beat of drums flowed into her ears, the tiredness in her legs and arms slowly dissipating. A small furry creature curled up in her lap, humming with pleasure at the warmth of another body, another mind, collapsing into each other. 

Ada smiled and began to compose: 

The sweep of stars across a night sky
Constitute a cathedral of the mind
A realm where black hole physics and human poetry
Dance in the fabric of spacetime
Where time is visible in ancient starlight