Notions
June 24, 2013 / Find Your Place In It
Heard at Bryce National Park, following a visit to the Grand Canyon:
“It’s just rocks.
I am tired of seeing just rocks.”
Imagine all the things on our planet. Bring each into your mind’s eye, then imagine each one as a dot, its own dot, but just a very tiny dot. Here are some things to get you started, and you can look up the ones you don’t know.
albatross ant birch bear caddisfly crow dugong dog eel e. coli bacteria fern fig granite pebble gopher hippopotamus hawkweed iron ore ice jackal Joshua tree kingfisher katydid lava lentil mosquito man nautilus neutron olivine rock owl palm pigeon quartz quoll rat raspberry sandstone slime mold taro trout uranium vole violet water woman xebec yucca yeast zinnia zyzzyva and whatever else you like
In your imagination, use the dots (each containing a thing of earth) to construct an image of our whole planet. Be sure you have included ALL the things on earth, even the ones you haven’t seen or don’t know about.
Then reduce our planet (now composed of dots of all of its things) to a teeny dot, and go ahead and make dots of all of the objects in our little rinky-dink solar system, too.
There are a lot of these dot-systems in the whole Universe. More than one could count.
Step back now. Can you discern your place in it? Are not you, the plants, the other animals, and yes, the rocks, all the same? Do not all of these things belong to our gorgeous world and make it what it is, matchless in all the Universe? You and the rocks. Rejoice, that you are here to see it.