I just watered the foliage in my yard, and now I’m sitting on my doorstep, looking at the spider webs in the bushes. I spot a spider that has braved the sudden water storm, and is methodically spinning a web between two small branches. I look more closely, and I can see several other webs, all glistening with water drops. The spider’s entire reason for living is spinning these webs to feed itself and I assume, its young. What I also assume is that it doesn’t realize (or care) that the webs look lovely beaded with water, with the sun shining through them. It’s a spontaneous, beautiful piece of art, right there for my viewing enjoyment. It’s a fine reward for not mashing its creator into a tissue.
About a week ago, I was in Colorado, shivering on my parents’ patio at 2 a.m., staring up at the sky at the Perseid meteor shower. There was no moon, and the sky was full of stars. Just looking at the Milky Way, all 200 billion stars of it, made me dizzy and that’s just the teeny-tinest fraction of the known universe. The universe is 12-14 billion years old and 156 billion light years wide, (give or take a light year) and just crammed packed full of stars and planets and God knows what else. To add to the sheer enormity of it all, there are theories of parallel universes, beyond our dimension. THIS universe, that humans can only see the smallest part of, may be just one of millions. That’s a lot of space. I firmly believe that there’s other life out there; there HAS to be. Something, somewhere out there has to have crawled out of primordial ooze and evolved into a creature that can look up and marvel at its own view of the stars. I thought about all those other worlds, other creatures. What things keep them awake? What’s important to them? What do they think about? What are their lives like?
I’ve been stewing lately about some things in my life that are irking me. As an introvert, it’s so easy for me to become mired in labyrinthine thoughts and projected scenarios. But what’s the point? I can either change something or I can’t. If I can, I need to take action. If I can’t, I need to deal and not spend time thinking “What if?” When I think about the lives of a spider and a creature 50 billion light years away, can my little issues really be worth wasting precious time on? I need things like this to remind me that I’m a tiny part of the huge web of existence. I don’t mean in a diminishing way, just that everything, whether it’s got two, eight, or fifty legs, are all in the same cosmological boat chugging across time and space, and there’s something comforting in that. I think I’ll go take a walk.
About a week ago, I was in Colorado, shivering on my parents’ patio at 2 a.m., staring up at the sky at the Perseid meteor shower. There was no moon, and the sky was full of stars. Just looking at the Milky Way, all 200 billion stars of it, made me dizzy and that’s just the teeny-tinest fraction of the known universe. The universe is 12-14 billion years old and 156 billion light years wide, (give or take a light year) and just crammed packed full of stars and planets and God knows what else. To add to the sheer enormity of it all, there are theories of parallel universes, beyond our dimension. THIS universe, that humans can only see the smallest part of, may be just one of millions. That’s a lot of space. I firmly believe that there’s other life out there; there HAS to be. Something, somewhere out there has to have crawled out of primordial ooze and evolved into a creature that can look up and marvel at its own view of the stars. I thought about all those other worlds, other creatures. What things keep them awake? What’s important to them? What do they think about? What are their lives like?
I’ve been stewing lately about some things in my life that are irking me. As an introvert, it’s so easy for me to become mired in labyrinthine thoughts and projected scenarios. But what’s the point? I can either change something or I can’t. If I can, I need to take action. If I can’t, I need to deal and not spend time thinking “What if?” When I think about the lives of a spider and a creature 50 billion light years away, can my little issues really be worth wasting precious time on? I need things like this to remind me that I’m a tiny part of the huge web of existence. I don’t mean in a diminishing way, just that everything, whether it’s got two, eight, or fifty legs, are all in the same cosmological boat chugging across time and space, and there’s something comforting in that. I think I’ll go take a walk.
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