THE FORCE - WORLD WITHOUT END An old proverb states, "If you stand still long enough, the entire world will pass you by." Not many of us can sit still for more than a few hours, and then not without some distraction like television, the radio, the stereo, or some other modern entertainment device. Imagine for a few moments, sitting still in your backyard with nothing to distract you. Below you is the cool, dark earth. From within that primordial mother's bosom, seeds sprout and bring forth life. Before you is an emerald green blade of grass. It is growing right before your eyes. Sit still long enough and you will notice that it is a millimeter longer. The blade contains millions of cells. You know they exist even though they are invisible to you. A few months before, they were locked up in the microscopic seed which cracked and fed the new shoot. While digging through the soil, you find a small worm. It wiggles in your fingers as you hold it up to the sky and observe how its millions of cells ebb and flow to make it move so gracefully across your hand. Beside you is a small petunia. It seems more real than life. Brilliant hues vibrate before your eyes. A honeybee zooms in, hovers near the petals, and feeds on the pollen. Its legs bulge with the fruits of its labors. You wonder how its wings can beat so swiftly without their tearing away from the delicate body. For a moment it remains near you as you sit still, and then it moves on to another flower without bothering you in any way. What drives the bee's wings making them beat so rapidly? What makes the worm so soft and yet capable of squirming in, in, into the hard packed earth's crust? What creates the brilliant colors which arrest your attention and hold you in rapture? Scooping a handful of topsoil, you calculate that in order to dig to the other side of the earth, you would need to remove 8000 miles of dirt, rocks, and clay and whatever else got in your way. That's 710,000,000 feet. At 24 handfuls per foot...oh well, trillions of handfuls. Imagine for a moment, then, that every handful you remove would be one dollar off the national debt. It's now up to 4 trillion. Better get a few hundred super-heavy-duty backhoes, you decide. Your hands are not ready for such an undertaking. You look at your hand. What a marvelous tool it is, comprised of more than 30 bones, 15 joints, countless nerves and tendons, muscle and sinew, and nails which break off and miraculously grow back without your noticing. A small cut festers on your index finger. You're not sure where and when you got it. You study it closely, and decide it's not serious. You wonder how many times you've lacerated your fingers and each and every time they healed. Cell by cell, the cut disappeared until the finger you remember reappeared. Your hand is once again beautiful in its own unique way. Your hands are a truly unique creation. Remember when you were an infant and for the first time in your life you became aware of your fingers? You looked at them, out of focus of course, and wondered what they were. You wiggled them, and they moved. Somehow, you made no connection between your wiggling them and an awareness that they belonged to you. As you reminisce, you recall that those hands, so small and pudgy once upon a time, are now gnarled, cracked, and sometimes reluctant to awaken in the morning and do what you will them to do. Those hands changed over time. They are much larger now, but are not too different from those which you first looked at so many years ago. Or are they? Each and every day of your life the cells in your body die and are replaced by new ones. Your red and white blood cells die and regenerate themselves every seven days or so. Imagine that the blood that was in your body just a week ago is no longer the same. Likewise, the cells in your body die and are replaced by new ones without your noticing it. Every two years, all the cells in your body will die off and be replaced by new ones. The body that you are now looking at, in fact, did not exist two years ago. Yes, it appears to be the same, but now you know now it isn't. Where did the old body go? How can this be? If this takes place within my body, you ask, is this happening to all the other people within the world as well? What about the cells in the earth, the blade of grass, the wiggling worm, the petunia, and in the hovering honeybee? Ah, yes, they too die and regenerate themselves. The blade, bee, worm, and petunia do not live long enough completely be reborn again. They are annuals. You are a most unique perennial. How can this be? What is it that drives the force through the green stem? What is it that guides and supports the birth and death of cells? What force is so omnipotent, so omniscient, so omnipresent that it can intervene in the cellular construction of the myriad living and non-living beings inhabiting the face of the earth, the water, the sky, and the galaxies above? How can the light from a star millions of light years away still be traveling toward the earth when it may not even exist? How can there be more than one galaxy than the Milky Way? How can there be more than one sun like our own shining within the heavens and radiating out to the farthest reaches of its own system, giving life, heat and light? What is it that drives the force through the green fuse? There is only one force, and it is present in that handful of earth, the blade of grass, the worm, the luscious petunia, and the human hand. It is the same force which controls the nuclear reactions on the suns's surface. It is the same force upon which our most profound beliefs exist, and which guide us to protect the blade of grass, the worm, the petunia, and the human hand? It is the same force which was, is, and forever will be, world without end...