Pineridge Blog

Y?gen is a Japanese word that doesn’t translate into English well. Roughly, it is “an awareness of the universe that triggers emo-tional responses too deep and powerful for words.”

Maybe, but you begin to understand Y?gen when you stop to realize that at this moment you are sitting on a planet spinning at over a thousand miles an hour, hurtling seventy thousand miles an hour through space in its annual rotation around the sun. The sun is one of an infinite number of stars in the universe. Y?gen is realizing there are more stars in the heavens than there are grains of sand on the earth.

Y?gen is also realizing all of the complicated processes at work right now from gravity to photosynthesis guiding life on the plan-et. And as you read these words you understand them because the 100 billion neurons in your brain work together in a perfect symphony to enable you to be you. Your heart, lungs and internal organs are even now performing a multitude of processes to con-vert the air you are now inhaling and the food you ate for break-fast into your life.

Y?gen is realizing that the creation was not complete until God invited you to share its very unfolding. At this moment you are standing on the leading edge of creation with God who is at once beyond the farthest star and at the same time tucked neatly in each of the spaces within your atoms.

I hope that you have an experience of Y?gen today, but if you can’t get all the way to Y?gen, maybe you can settle for humility, gratitude to the Creator, wonder or even quiet joy.

Jim