The world spilled out in front of me, as it will do sometimes, and I was struck by it. Thrown into wonder. In admission of its awesome endlessness and paradox, I find myself unsatisfied with words of description.

The world is everything. It is easy to know that. And yet it is nearly nothing, also easy to see.

Next to feeling, I would say the world is tiny, until I stood before the sea. I have felt myself sink into an ocean of love and into one of despair, both so huge I have lost msyelf in them, and yet I hold them both within me. They are not the only oceans in this body. And yet when I stand on the beach looking out into something so big I cannot even begin to comprehend it, I will wonder to myself how the Earth could hold more than one, though it is the same way inside me.

One tiny speck, not more than a grain of sand in the desert nor more than snowflake in a blizzard, among billions of other specks scattered across a plane so vast as to be unquanitfiable. And it is everything I will ever know and more. I cannot know the expanse of the world. As much as it burns in me to see it all and know it all, it is impossible to navigate every crevice, canopy, cliff, alley, reef, or shore. And yet it is just a speck.

Enormity spinning along on something so insignificantly small in the great scheme of things. So much bigger than me that I might never know it completely, and yet if you could hold the universe in your hand, you would not even see it.

So beautiful, and often simultaneously ugly. Inspiring and discouraging. Birth and death. Big and small. And all here. But where is here? In space and time, how important is this place that is everything my life is and more