Nothing as it seems…
I’m still walking long before sunrise. Even though the temperatures are cooling a bit, that hour before the sun transforms the day with its power still draws me. There is no experience like feeling the wisps of a spider’s work strung across the sidewalk, work that has been undisturbed because no human presence has walked that way in hours. But this morning, the glory of the hour was the call was the moon.
As I looked at the near-harvest moon, I thought — wait, maybe this beauty is not as far away as we think it is. Here I stand, on the back landing of my home, with a tiny slab of plastic and silicon in my hand, taking a picture of something that is 238,555 miles away from where I stand. I have no telescope, I have no space ship, and yet…I can see the patterns of shadow and light on its surface. I am standing here, in the dark (mostly), with this little box that is built to convert light into image. And with it, I can see all of this, just as I was able to see every strand of that spider web without disturbing the spider weaving it.
And I asked myself, what else seems beyond my grasp to understand, too far away for my human eyes and my human heart and my human soul, and yet, I have some simple tool that would help me reach it? The distance I perceive may not be insurmountable. That distance, in fact, may not be a distance at all. More questions to ponder.
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