As February speeds by, I’m a few weeks into teaching my first full-length class: Spirituality, Science, and the Creative Process at Otis College of Art and Design. I’m blessed with a tight group of intelligent, engaged students, so I’m having a great time. And interweaving art and creativity into my poetic interconnections between spirituality and science is revealing itself to be an inspiring exercise.

Researching material for our first session, I found a famous quote by Michelangelo that, somehow, I’d never heard before. Explaining one of his most famous sculptures, the artist said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

This December marks my second holiday season writing this blog. Looking back over 2009, it’s very clearly been a year of bounty and blossoming for me. Many of you reading this blog post were attendees at my first lectures and workshops. I met others of you during my presentation at the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Rafael, CA. And some of you discovered this blog solely over the internet, querying Google with unlikely combinations of religion/science terms and finding me! All year, I’ve been honored and touched by your thoughtful participation and enthusiastic support. Thank you!

Back in July I was asked to contribute a review blurb to an upcoming book called Death & Sex. The request came from Dorion Sagan, one of the book’s authors—an amazing writer and a friend of this blog. I immediately said yes. I was sent an advance copy of the text and spent the next few evenings unable to put it down, rapt.

The book is a hybrid: two essays by different authors bound into a single work. Tyler Volk’s Death examines how our passing feeds the greater cycle of life, our bodies breaking down into food and energy for other animals and plants. Our greatest personal fear is thus recast as an ecological act of self-sacrificial love. It’s a deeply spiritual view of dying.

Sunday I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at an “Artist Beit Midrash” presented by Jewish Artists Initiative in Los Angeles, CA. Traditionally, a Beit Midrash is a study group in which weekly Torah readings are mined for deeper meanings. This group was unique in that it centered on a general theme instead of a chapter of scripture. That theme was the Jewish doctrine of Yetzer HaTov and Yetzer HaRa—the good and evil inclinations in the human soul.

Are human beings fundamentally good or essentially evil? Jewish philosophy proposes we’re both, observing that we seem to possess equal potential for doing right and wrong. In classical Judaism, the Yetzer HaTov is analogous to an angel on our shoulder reminding us to obey God’s law; the Yetzer HaRa is like the devil on our other shoulder urging us to break it. Our work, classically considered, is to side with our angels.

Today’s poetic interconnection between spirituality and science begins with a deceptively simple question: Why is the sky dark at night?

Ask most people this question and their immediate answer will be this: because the sun has gone down. But what about all the other stars in the sky? Rays from our sun are not the only starlight we receive. With countless other stars in space shining at us, seemingly infinite sources of light, why isn’t our sky eternally bright even when the sun is hidden from our side of the planet?

One of this blog’s first posts, Indra’s Net and the IGM, described a surprising correspondence between Mahayana Buddhist myth and actual findings in cutting-edge cosmology‐the branch of physics exploring the creation of our universe. The post ended with this question: What happens when metaphors become measurables?

Subsequent posts have also explored the implications of modern science seeming to agree with ancient spirituality. Are these simply poetic interconnections, or might creative intuition deserve the same practical respect we give objective observation in decoding our world?