THANKFUL FRIDAY

I am obsessed with this picture I took last week. I just sit and stare at it and try to count all the dew drops. My favorite part is that tiny line of spider webbing that stretches across the top of the tulip, decorated with teeny drops of water. It’s like a string of lights around a backyard patio or a spectacular circus show of tightrope walkers. There is a whole universe here where the bloom is the sun and dewdrops are the planets. And because I have looked at things under microscopic lenses, I know that many of those dewdrops contain life. It is equal parts fascinating and overwhelming.

The opening scene in Contact begins with close up view of a receiving dish somewhere on Earth. Then the camera pans out. You watch the dish get smaller and disappear as the scene continues to zoom out and out. The scene moves out and the Earth becomes tiny and then the solar system gets tiny. It zooms out past our universe and leaves us staring at the vastness of space. When I saw this movie in the theater, this scene almost made me fall out of my chair. My chest grew tight and I struggled to breath. The emptiness and vastness was too much for me to mentally handle. In fact, writing about it now makes me slightly breathless. Yet the opposite, the zooming in on stuff, fills me awe.

It is all the same thing.

The tulip in this picture is a galaxy in the universe of this garden. Our bodies are walking galaxies in our universe of communities. It just goes on and on and it is complicated. The more you ponder this, the more complicated it becomes. I like to hold a magnifying glass up to life because it feels less complex. It is my way of simplifying the infinite galaxies. The vastness of this life is untethering, but these small little galaxies right here in our own backyards, make me grounded and present. Today I am grateful for small galaxies.