i was distracted when d brought the camera back to me. working on something, i glanced up and thanked him. a few moments later, i asked him how the painting he was working on was going. “i scrubbed it,” he said. “what?!” i replied. “i started something else,” he said. when he left the room, i looked at the camera. this is what i found. an extraordinary look at earth, removed from earth, from a distance away. fragmented mother planet through the haze, i found it to be a striking – and yet abstract – image, with rich, almost-metallic hues. how does he do that?
this is EARTH INTERRUPTED V: FROM A DISTANCE. we need this perspective every now and then. we lose sight. we fall prey to overwhelm in our own stuff. we are but a speck of a fragment on this earth. we are both tiny and vast. and we are capable of doing both tiny and vast things to help our earth and each other.
leonard pitts jr. wrote an opinion column, a gorgeous essay on the moon that we read the other morning. only it wasn’t really about the moon. he references a short film (which we watched) by filmmakers wylie overstreet and alex gorosh called “a new view of the moon” where the two men “wandered around los angeles with a telescope…asking a cross section of passersby in a cross section of places…to put their eyes to the viewfinder and gaze upon what they’ve looked at a million times yet never seen.” the two men found that people responded in the same way, awestruck, profoundly moved by the vision. the short doesn’t feature the moon; it features the reactions of people as they gaze into the telescope. leonard calls it “a hymn to our common humanity.” a reminder that in all our differences we are the same…”we spend too much time looking down and across.” we are, yes, tiny in the vastness – something i felt myself in writing about david’s painting FROM A DISTANCE that we chose for thursday’s melange. “so each other is all we have. but then, it should be all we need,” leonard writes.
when i drew this simple graphic, i wanted to portray a uncomplicated thought. an image unadorned with fancy-ness, but, hopefully, clear…or, at the very least, thought-provoking. “your” earth with arrows upward, “your” earth with arrows that circle around, “our” earth with arrows that circle around, “earth” with arrows that circle around.
it is all a circle. what we do counts. how we help counts. how we help our earth. how we help each other.
at 1am, we walked to the lakefront. away from as many lights as we could get away from, we laid on some old steps, bricks and mortar digging into our backs so that we could gaze straight up, watching the night sky for the meteor shower. the late air was cool, gentle breezes sneaking past us in our vigil. the meteor shower information site said that at 1am cst we would be able to see 50-100 meteors an hour, shooting across the night sky. now, how they know this is a scientific study that i am not familiar with. but it is magical. and it is vast.
the streaks of white light across navyblueblack make us draw in our breath. i’m wondering how far away this meteor is…how it is that we, here on earth, can see this amazing sight. such a big sky. such tiny bodies in contrast lying on the ground, waiting for the symphony to start, waiting for the downbeat, the symphony that has been continuously playing, the downbeat lost in centuries upon centuries of time gone by. like any good piece of music, it’s the rests in between the notes, the rests in between the meteorstreaks, that build the anticipation, that create the emotionflow, that bring tears to your eyes. each burst, each streak, of whitelight was a miracle, a tiny moment exploding in time, so far away, in vast vastness.
this morning over coffee on the deck i watched a bumblebee fly to the big jar of sunflowers on the table. it, with seemingly intentional purpose, landed on the sunflower’s large head. i studied this bumblebee and, as i did, it occurred to me that it, too, was a tiny being in the middle of its own universe. that sunflower, i come to learn, is not just one flower. instead, it is composed of a mass of hundreds of flowers, all growing individually and from where each sunflower seed will originate. the yellow rays of petals are there to protect the interior of the sunflower. the sunflower, before blooming, will track the sun through the day, leaning in to garner its energy, intent on its own purpose in its own universe. it is, indeed, its own little universe, offering nutrients and life to that very bumblebee, who pollinates the flowers within the flower…and the circle goes on. looking even closer, i could see small quarter-inch-inchworms inching their way around the brown center of the flower(s). for that quarter-inch-inchworm this big brown field was such a big sky, and its tiny body was in great contrast. magical. vast.
time stretches out in front of us. and behind us. we are tiny and we are big. we gather in the moments, we breathe them, we rejoice, we worry, we ponder, we move. there is no downbeat and the symphony is already playing, has been playing and will continue to play. always. it is magical. and it is vast.
fragmented mother planet through the haze, i found it to be a striking – and yet abstract – image, with rich, almost-metallic hues. how does he do that?
reverse threading 