Greg Edmondson....................................cover,15 Jason Ryberg

Crushed Velvet Void Jason Ryberg

The world has drawn back its billowed drapes and here we stand on the blurred edge of evening, our thoughts telescoping light years towards some dark, distant point.

Stretching, on the very tips of our twinkling, naked toes, we reach for escape velocity and with one massive explosion of effort we leap into the turning sky, tucking, rolling and tumbling into the soft, layered darkness of the crushed velvet void.

Suddenly the Earth is a small glass bead or an unblinking eye, swirling with cataracts of weather and civilization.

There, to our right, spanning the great expanse of the chemical / color spectrum, are the star factories: cirrus and stratocumulus clouds of glowing gas and glittering dust, slowly contracting, condensing into clusters of fertile ground which will one day give rise to flowering suns and the smoking seeds of planets.

It has been said that the universe was once held to be a giant egg shell, flecked and speckled with millions of holes through which shined the divine light of heaven, so that the gods might monitor our progression, our evolution, our gestation...

(cont.)

But we, with all our modern conventions and standard models of wisdom, have come to see the universe in a different light-

a brilliant showering of sparks to show us the way.