Orbs, Orbs, Orbs

Blog repost from the 2009-- Happy Halloween!

“In a world where carpenters get resurrected, everything is possible.” 

-----Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter 

     Orbs are photographic phenomena that show up as round transparent, translucent, or opaque hovering spheres usually in digital photographs. They can be large or small or even overlapping. With the right frame of reference, they can be downright mystical: angels hovering about, or the opposite, demons menacing about. Or they can be energy fields produced by the spirits of past departed checking in on loved ones left behind. Or just friendly spirits who enjoy your company. Or spirits who are curious. Maybe they are doors to another dimension. Perhaps they are manifested by the sheer vibration of a room. You know the feeling when you walk into a room and can immediately sense the tension or excitement or despair, etc.

     Or they can just be dust: dust that reflects an off-focus image from the flash of a camera. It's probably a good idea to consult a camera specialist, but the explanation has something to do with the shortened focal length between the camera lens and the chip that records the digital picture. The focal point will be in focus, but other points (dust) brightened by the flash will be out of focus, causing the orb effect.

     I can handle this information however primitive and poorly understood. However, after seeing all those orbs in the photographs of Yoga classes on winter days shortly after we opened at PH Balance,  I'm inclined to think I might need to clean the place thoroughly--dust, vacuum, clean blinds.

     Which, of course, makes me prefer the mystical explanation much more.

There is a passage in the New Testament book of Luke where the evil religious leaders tell Jesus to forbid his followers from praising him. It's Palm Sunday. Jesus replies with some of the oddest words. "If these were silent, the stones would shout out." (Luke 19:40) This didn't make much sense until a guy at our church lots of years ago explained this verse through the theory of quantum physics.  While I'm no Einstein, I did grasp that quantum physics describes a much different reality relating to waves and particles that do not function within our reality as we understand it. It's all about a vibrational energy that keeps the universe from, well, not being the universe, and if one were to look at the sub-atomic particles in the stones, one might see a great deal of activity that, under the right circumstances, could cause sound, maybe in the form of shouting.

     So I write all this to say that if we are created from the dust as stated by the Yahwist writer, who is the oldest reference in the Torah (Genesis 2:7), who's to say whether or not a bright flash of light can bring momentary life to a speck of dust, liberating whatever wave energies might be bound in that particle? Who's to say that ashes to ashes, dust to dust is just a mere explanation of the time we experience in relativity and that quantumly speaking, our ashes and dust have a whole other experience?