The following was written in early May and I thought I would post it and then move forward…..

Back in Houston and once again up too early with BBD curled next to me sleeping.  I woke this morning thinking about the plants created on day 2 and how they appeared somehow to be ‘wild’ plants and not organized into a squared off structure and planted in careful rows like a garden. I know, off subject, shouldn’t I be talking about water animals and birds. But the verses for today appear to be somewhat the same kind of creation: Teeming (to swarm, prolific and futile).  There is a wildness of wildness about Day 5.  “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the seas…” God says.  And, thus, fish and foul ‘move’ freely through the sea and the air, reproduce, birth, parent, eat the plants, eat each other, school, flock, cooperate, fight and die (this list is meant to be illustrative and not comprehensive) – do everything a swimming and flying creature can do. And God, thought this was good and blessed this.  This is the first mention of a ‘Blessing’. I reviewed fifteen different English translations, they all use the root word ‘bless’.  Humbly, the mysteries of these passages continue to appear like young rabbits from a birthing hole. According to Genesis, God did not ‘bless’ anything up to this point.  God thought all were good, but the first blessing went to creatures of the water and birds of the air?

It’s three days later and and I have been thinking about the first ‘blessing’.  So God did not bless the light or darkness or water or sea or land or plants or stars or the lights in the sky, but thought all good, and, thus, I have moved further into the belief that the blessing of creatures of the sea and air must be very significant.  If you play the difference game (sesame street lessons in logic), then the difference between what came before and the creatures is the utility of them. All that came before are necessary for creation of the creatures with a ‘breath of life’.

I am sitting in a noisy Austin, Texas coffee shop (Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” from a corner speaker), and I am surrounded by a cornucopia of the mixed character of this city.  A typically dressed American women in her 70s sits in front of me chatting (she just mentioned that she left home without ‘putting on her makeup this morning’) with her friend while around her is a broad mix of people including a heavily tattoo fellow tapping rapidly on keyboard, a business person in starched white shirt with his tie slung over his shoulder to keep it out of his food, haggard college students and ones wearing work out clothes working on a papers/studying, and a couple of bearded college professor having a casual meeting. A fellow in his early early 30s  sitting next to me moves like a sloth – slow, methodical… he sits and stares at his keyboard and types very slow.  I women just walked in wearing shorts that reveal a 6 inch by 4 inch blue/green/black skull head tattoo on the side of her leg. I am surprised at the number of traditional business suites that I see here.  The crowd is mainly Euro American (Americans of European descent) which is common in this part of Austin.  The older lady in front of me just said that she had been giving her dog Prosiac to settle her down, and they are now discussing the craziness of mixed breed dogs.   Sloth man next to me is speeding up – maybe he needed food.

I have been looking forward to writing about the next few verses since I wrote about creation day three a couple of days ago.  I have been thinking about the ideas of creating plants and organic material before creating the ‘lights in the expanse’.  I did not understand what was meant by the word ‘expanse’.  One of the translations used “Vault” and I didn’t like it because my mind immediately jumped to the definition like bank vault  and not like vaulted ceilings which is what the translator intended.   Some translations used the word ‘firmament’ instead of ‘expanse’ or ‘vault’.  The Hebrew word used (raki’a) means simply ‘expanse’ but more than something that just spreads out in uninterrupted space, but a solid structure and, thus, I now understand the word ‘vault’ as in the ceiling. 

So God created this solid expansive structure of sea and land and un-named plants and then ‘lights’ in the sky.  This is not light but ‘lights’. I think of this as ‘light’ from a lamp (Day 1) and the ‘lights’ in the lamp (Day 4).  One the wave and the other the physical device that produces it.  How many lights (objects that produce light) to fill the raki’a?  No clue.  Our ‘visible’ universe of stars (discussed in the “In the Beginning’ post) is an estimated 3 times 10 to the 23rd stars (for the non math folks that’s a 3 with 23 zeros after it).  If this helps for perspective, the adult human has an estimated 10 to the 14th cells or 100 trillion cells.  

And the purpose of the stars is to ‘keep time’ by marking the seasons and the days and years and is to give light on the ‘earth’.  Now this is the first time that the word ‘earth’ is mentioned since Genesis 1:1-2 where it is said to be ‘formless and empty’.  So the earth is obviously formed and not so obviously seeded for plant life, and, two great lights are created (and if we hadn’t figured this out ‘stars’ too .. end of verse 16) and the two great lights are to ‘govern’ the day and the night (sun and moon) and to separate light from darkness.  (aside why mention ‘to separate light from darkness here in verse 18.. have to think about that).

So we now have a huge planted and growing wild plants (forests, meadows, glades, tundras, prairies….) (the size of the universe and/or as small as our earth) and everything needed for plants to grow and thrive including water, land, seeds and light (and seasons). 

And God thought this was good and this was the end of the fourth day.

Time to leave the coffee shop.  I learned a couple of minutes ago that one of the fellows sitting near me is an owner and creative director of The Hideout Theatre in downtown Austin (his name and picture can be found on the front page of the web site).  It’s much quieter now and the Simon and Garfunkel is singing “Homeward Bound” on the corner speaker.

Homeward bound
I wish I was
Homeward bound
Home, where my thought’s escaping
Home, where my music’s playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

As I finished my editing the song changed to Bob Dylan singing “Blow’n in the Wind’……

OEC thinks it is too early.  The funny cat came in from outside when I went out to my car to get something.  The old cat sits near me upright with his legs tucked under him (like a rabbit sits) eyes closed.  BBD, after a warm morning greeting and getting petted for few minutes, has gone back to his dog bed.  OEC just shifted to a very conventional cat sleeping pose, curled on the foot couch near.  He is settling in.

I have not written in a while and, normally ‘plan’ to write a few days in advance so that I can think about these verses.  But I woke this morning very early and decided that I had not ventured down my Genesis path for a while, so I should just dive in and see what comes.  So here I am at 3:23am in the morning.

So in our story we have just completed the second day and God has separated the water horizontally (as described in the last post).  Now it looks like He (I think correct should be He/She but for short He) is splitting the water vertically.  Interesting that verse 9 it says He gathered the water to one place (or moved it) and ‘dry land’ appeared (not marsh or bog – dry).  He names them and, thus, marks ownership and likes the creation of both ‘land’ and ‘sea’.

Now I need some help – what happens next is a mystery to me (ok I little melodramatic here… just a greater degree of mystery).  At the end of the third day, out of ‘land’ and not ‘sea’, God produces the first forms of life – plants.  Why plants?  Why here? Why out of dry land?  What does ‘according to there kind’ mean?  Why did he not name them?  This is before the creation of the stars and the sun and the moon… they are created on the fourth day.  Plants. Now? Here?  Why?

What first comes to mind is how early and fundamental the creation of the sustaining principles of organic life is founded.  Immediately. 1) gathered water into seas, 2) create dry land (Houston, we have a periodic table), 3) plant life (Houston, we have organic chemistry and the ‘spark’ of life).  It says that ‘land’ produced vegetation and looking back over the verses, this make sense as organically, you would need to create ‘land’ and all the mineral components of ‘land’ to make organic life possible.  If you consider the ‘pure’ water hypothesis in earlier post “Light”, absolutely ‘pure’ water in perfect symmetry is sterile water. 

So before the stars and sun and moon (and the universes out there swirling) were created, God created organic life.  And God liked the “Sea’ and the “Land’ and the un-named plants that the Land produced. 

We have the fundamentals for a garden.  It now needs to be planted.

OEC cat ‘talked’ to me (some kind of mix between a grumble, whine and a meow) and has disappeared.  BBD has wandered in and now sleeps on the hard floor beside me. In the background, I hear a train whistle and the rumble of a distant train.  A call to move.

Appreciate your kind patience as I continue to worked through these verses.

It’s 3:26am and I have been up since a bit after 2.  To early for the BBD to be waiting.  He was stretched out on the small couch snoozing and a place that he knows is against house rules. House dog rule number 2: Puppy dog feet shall stay on the floor.  I am sometimes soft on the enforcement of this rule when it comes to this particular couch.  I came around the corner and saw him sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to wake him, but, of course, the second I made a sound in the kitchen he was up an at my side — quick to hide the evidence.  I would never have allowed this until last year when BBD was injured.  We were playing a ruckus game of fetch in the yard and the ball went into the street.  BBD launched for the ball as it bounced on the pavement and twisted in a U shape.  He let out a dog scream that I will  never forget, and then tried to get up, and dragged himself toward me using only his two front legs.  His eyes said, “Help Me”.  He had seriously injured his back and was in terrible pain.  After a lot of vet time and rehabilitation by me, he has recovered most of the use of one of his back legs (can walk and run), but his back end and one leg are weak.  Over the last few weeks, I have seen a marked change for the worse.  So I now let him nap on the couch..

I keep wanting to go faster through these verses.  I am not breaking anybody’s rules, but it seems wrong to go faster even though I want to. I keep thinking at this rate this is going to take forever to get through just Genesis.  But that is not how it should be as there is to much here and to much that I have missed so I plod on.

So waters separated.  I have been contemplating verse 6 by itself for the last couple of days and just decided to take a look at verse 7, and this helped a lot.  If you look at just verse 6, it just says that God made an expanse between the water. So what does that mean?  In what way did God separate the water?  There are lots of ways to separate water.  You can cut it in two like Moses and the parting of the red sea.  You can divide it by using a pail – taking from one place and moving it a separate place. You get the idea.  Now we get to verse 7 and it explained to me how, “from the water above it.”  A horizontal slice.  So conventionally in earthly terms, how do we humans horizontally separate water (and lets make it interesting – no spills over).  It would take an incredible engineering feat to do such a thing on a large scale. The weight, the liquid, the waves – I do not think it possible on a large scale.  Think of it this way – a horizontal Hoover Dam.

So a horizontal split, now an equal split?  I just looked up the distribution of water on earth and found an estimate on a USGS site that 0.001% of water is in the Earths atmosphere as water .  And through Wiki’s water site, it is different on each planet (obvious point) and on different moons throughout our one solar system.  So let’s just say divided… but this is a narrow view if we just think in earthly terms.. 

I think what is more interesting is not the proportion of the split but the horizontal direction.  In earlier verses, God is hovering over the water.  And now we have a split in the water horizontally.  So if God was hovering over the water after the slip it would be

God Hovering

Water

Expanse “Sky”

Water

A great expanse it is. Ok right now if I went out and looked at the “sky” I would see thousands of stars, but the lights do not appear in the expanse until Genesis 1:14, but what verse 14 tells me is that the expanse will include stars and universes.  So I am thinking the expanse is empty at this point – another white page to write on.

It’s around 5 now and I have been up a good part of the night….  I think I am going to try to get some sleep and begin my plodding again after a bit of rest.  Before I finish with this post, I want to note the great mystery of it all and I feel sometimes ‘wrong’ for working through these verses — the mystery is so great and my thoughts so idle, disorganized and small.  But thinking about and probing this great mystery has been a valuable journey for me, and I hope my thoughts will help you in some small way as you take your own journey through Genesis.

BBD is asleep near me.  OEC is making a racket playing with a window blind in the  other room – I think he is trying to move it out of the way to look outside.

There is exciting news from the WordPress world as they released version 3.1 a couple of weeks ago (normally a ho hum for bloggers), but  I am in the process of developing a WordPress application and came across a wonderful new feature that will forever change the way WordPress is used: Post Formats.   Native WordPress historically had just one format:  The standard post.  This version has (not unlike other blogging engines like tumblr) different post formats giving a choice as to the type of post that someone creates which should make future site and theme designs much more interesting.  The post formats are limited (in fine WordPress fashion) and will turn out to be creatively unlimited when it comes to bloggers and developers.  The formats include:

• aside – Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.
• gallery – A gallery of images. Post will likely contain a gallery shortcode and will have image attachments.
• link – A link to another site. Themes may wish to use the first <a href=””> tag in the post content as the external link for that post. An alternative approach could be if the post consists only of a URL, then that will be the URL and the title (post_title) will be the name attached to the anchor for it.
• image – A single image. The first <img /> tag in the post could be considered the image. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the image URL and the title of the post (post_title) will be the title attribute for the image.
• quote – A quotation. Probably will contain a blockquote holding the quote content. Alternatively, the quote may be just the content, with the source/author being the title.
• status – A short status update, similar to a Twitter status update.
• video – A single video. The first <video /> tag or object/embed in the post content could be considered the video. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the video URL. May also contain the video as an attachment to the post, if video support is enabled on the blog (like via a plugin).
• audio – An audio file. Could be used for Podcasting.
• chat – A chat transcript

The above descriptions are straight from the WordPress Codex for all you brother geeks out there http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats (note to self, I am going to have to figure out how to use footnotes.)

4am and BBD met me at the door thinking it was time for breakfast.  He shakes and stretches and begins a light version of his happy dance and then I disappoint him by telling him, “BBD, No, it is not time to eat,”  and use sign language to ask him to settle down.  He knows the words and the signals.  He will follow me around the house as I boil water to make tea, organize my laptop and books to write.  He is now stretched out near me on the rug sleeping lightly. He knows it is not quite time to get up and not quite time for breakfast.

BBD has not moved, nor has the verse on the top of page.  I read this verse last week and pondered why it was here and this morning as I wrote the top line I couple of thoughts came to me about what this is all about.  Two significant things are happening in this verse: 1) God is placing a name of something for the first time, and 2) TIME began.  

In the Bible, when God names something, it is very significant and important.  This is more than just a label.  It is a mark of ownership of God, a branding and a brand.  I have attended and participated in cattle brandings and there is a point in the process where the young calf has been completely prepared and the last thing that is done is the branded.    Why the hot iron?  It is a permanent sign that a process took place (the calf received its protective shots) and a sign to all marking its ownership.  The verse tells me, warns me, that day and night are Gods.  

And then something else happens: a cycle is created: Evening came, and then morning of the first day.  Time is measured. And something else happened that just came to my mind: the first reference to a number. The number 1.  This seems logical to measure something you need numbers. 

I am stuck by the significance of this verse.  Ownership, Time and Numbers all in one little verse.

BBD is up and restless. He knows it is time to eat.  The one eyed cat (OEC) came in earlier and head butted BBD and now is curled nearby asleep. BBD just yawned and is staring blankly into space, the OEC just rolled over on his back and appears to be cat dreaming.  When I get up in a couple of minutes to feed the BBD, the OEC will be grudgingly wake and follow me to where BBD is fed, and will expect to be feed too. He will trail wisely behind the bonding ball of energy.  It does not matter whether he is hunger or not, or whether there is food in his bowl outside, or what time it is, he expects a cup of food in his bowl (like the BBD), and to be escorted to the door. Funny little thing, he is now snoring.

Note to the reader: I am not a Bible scholar, so the wonderings in this blog are not currently based on significant research and my daughter at the University of Chicago (I am sure) would want and demand references to other peoples work when writing about such things (but this is a Blog so I can write informally what I want.)  However, I will always reference other people’s work.

It is 3:36am and BBD is once again curled at my feet dreaming of breakfast.  This mornings 2:30am alarm clock was one of our cats asking to go outside and my idea that I would just quickly get up and let him out.  Over an hour later here I am – wide awake. The cat asking to go out does not sound unusual unless you consider that under the normal circumstances this cat would not be quietly yowling to go out, but trapped in a corner of the house by our other cat and making loud pleading cat noises that he needed to be rescued or more generally a cat cry for mercy. My 2:30am thoughts began with an uneasy feeling that our old one eyed black and white cat might be missing (he did not show up for dinner last night).  This little terrorist of a cat, king of the neighborhood, has been a constant in our home for 14 years; the kind of constant that includes a permanent scar or two on my children.  He is (I am not going to say ‘was’ yet) the kind of cat that would take great delight in digging his claws in your barefoot heal just as you were taking that first step down a flight of stairs or would sit in your lap and allow you to pet him and then without warning turn around and bite you.  And, yet, he was beloved.  Exactly how that works is a mystery to me, but here I am up at 4am in the morning worrying about the little creatures ware bouts.

I know where we are in our story and I have had lots of reasons to think about it this week… and He separated the light from the darkness.   The great binary separation.  The friction of our universe.   The first universal constraint:  Light is good.  Separate the light from the darkness.

I am having trouble writing about this for some reason.  Right now I am stuck and have writers amnesia when it comes to this very short verse.  Maybe this separation is so fundamental to the universe and built into every aspect of it, that the simplicity of binary and its ramifications on our lives is somehow hidden. I, like many people, associate light and dark with good and evil.   Is the great human struggle within the continuing separation of light and dark and this is being played out in our lives.  Or maybe I am I way off base and light and dark is not similar to good and evil in this context; that light and dark are more fundamental to the universe, something entirely different, and the construct of good and evil is but a small part of a greater design –> a hair on the light and dark binary dog.

The little cat that normally joins me here by the fire and head butts the BBD good morning has not shown up for breakfast. 

Addendum: He showed up late for breakfast…..

It’s early morning in my house before 4am, and I am greeted by my oversized Labrador Big Black Dog (BBD for short). He has been waiting for me.  As I open the door to my room, he bounds in and hits the spring on the door catch (the device keeping the door knob from putting a hole in the wall) and the once inert object sends sound reverberates through the quiet house. He hits that silly spring all the time and I wince every time – afraid that he is going to wake up the house. His boisterous greeting is not without purpose as he knows that it will soon be time for his breakfast (a most popular time of day) and he will receive his morning scratch.  It’s quiet again.  He now sleeps at my feet sprawled out by the fire and he knows breakfast is coming.  I just got up to get some coffee and learned that I had not emptied the steel decanter from the day before and the coffee had run out the top and onto the counter (caused by the mixing and the overflow of the new coffee that was suppose to fill the decanter and remains of the day old coffee).  My movement disturbed the Big Black Dog and he now lies curled in another spot in the room.

We left off in our story where the Spirit of God was hovering over the water in the darkness. I have been thinking about this strange passage for a week now. Wrestling with what this could mean.  God’s spirit was hovering over the water.  Was God disturbing the water?  No, the spirit was hovering over it and not ‘in’ it.  What did the water look like?  Was it a crashing sea of chaos like a bubbling caldron?  No. The image I imagine was one of pure liquid symmetry one in which the atomic particles (or waveforms) are perfectly aligned and in perfect order, so there would be no waves or ripples or any movement of the liquid of any kind because every, every element of the water would exist in an exquisitely aligned state. Did you ever see that stick figure of water in school with an Oxygen with the two Hydrogen molecule stuck to it (our ‘picture’ of the molecular structure of water).  I image these stick figures symmetrically balanced one on top of each other and in every direction and the size of the universe.  The slightest vibration will cause it to collapse.  The balance is like before the last piece is removed from the tower in the game Jenga (Jenga – a stacked blocks game where one competes to remove a piece from a tower of blocks and not have the tower fall down). And the Spirit of God hovers over the water, and the movement of the Spirit does not disturb the water.  And then God said, “Let there be Light!” and there was light. If the water was in perfect symmetry, I can come to no conclusion other then the water just exploded when the symmetry was cracked and the energy of light entered the water. The structure fell.  From perfect order to complete disorder from calm to incredible chaos. Wild. Beyond Wild.  And God saw that the light was good….

BBD just put his head in my lap telling me that his patient wait for breakfast time is nearly over. I will move in a moment and he will explode into a jumping joyful Big Black Dog.

I have been thinking about darkness for the last few day and in reference to the above verses.  You might have seen the movement of my thoughts from “In the Beginning” and then ‘Blackness’.  I know that I did not leave trail markers, and sorry for that honorable reader as I have not written for a while and feel rusty. When I think about the beginning of the Bible, I immediately jump to the next verse and the famous line “Let there be light.”, but I humbly admit that I had missed the first few verses and how important and interesting they are.  How about the definitive:  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  How have I missed this amazing and profound verse –> ‘God created everything!’. Have you ever thought of God’s creation as infinitely large and infinitely small.  Have you ever sat in a quiet place and thought about the universe as infinitely expansive in both directions expanding outward and inward.  Try it.    Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the water.  Again, missed this one too. What immediately stands out is the world “Now”.  It’s a conversational story telling style. Now the blank page had been created and it hadn’t been written on.  There is infinite possibilities of what could happen.  Why do I always remember the word ‘darkness’ in these verses?  The word plays such a minor part and it must be just the juxtaposition of darkness and light in the next line.  As I was contemplating these lines, I all of a sudden had thought about the water.  Pure water!  Without impurities, can you image what that looked like.  The purist large body of water that I have seen was Lake Tahoe as a child before all the development and pollution.  The water was so blue and you felt like you could see endlessly down into the watery depths – pristine and  incredibly beautiful.  And the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of this endlessly deep perfectly pure water. Amazing picture.  Can you imagine how beautiful this must have been?   Thinking of it this way, of course the next line would be ‘Let there be Light!’.