big small fast slow

There is relativity of size:

The tiny sugar ant marching through a horse's mane is unsure what a horse is.

Could there be creatures so big we humans don't fully notice them?


And how about relativity of the experience of time:

Is it possible a ninety-nine year lifetime for a human could be equal to only half a second in the life of a rock or something else that seems unmoving? The rock-beings likely would not notice us at all, our tiny blinks of melodramatic existence against a life 6 billion years long.

I am yours

I am yours
However distant you may be
There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me
There sings no bird but calls your name to me
Each memory that has left its trace with me
Lingers forever as a part of me

 


(Eric Clapton's adaptation of material by 12th century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi)

'What's it like,'
the little child asked,
'to be the fish
in the fish bowl?'

The goldfish darted
away and near.
'I don't know what to say,'
he thought,
and looked at the
giant face near him.

11 at night

It was 11 at night, 1975, I was wearing a parka, the wind was blowing, there was snow mounded here and there in the grad center parking lot. The moon was full, the night was quiet, clouds like translucent silk floated swiftly across the shining face of the moon. I stood there, my face turned up to the moon, my feet safe but cold in crepe-soled hiking boots. The sky was black, and ice hung from the bumpers of the parked cars.

My mind was empty of thought. The guitar performance ended an hour ago and the network of intricate sound and varied timing was a key that opened the lock to a dormant part of that mind, wordless, letting me hear at another level, and see another dimension of the freezing sky and I still need no words for what I learned. A door to a universe expansive Godness was open, and I absorbed all that my teaspoon of brain and heart could hold.

'Be-eeee Good!' E.T. the extra-terrestrial said to the teary-eyed little girl who had helped save his life.  

(Little girl - hmmph. E.T., old and wise, was smaller than she was!) 

He boarded the disc-shaped spacecraft that was flashing colorful beams of light. It quietly lifted up, and away.

Connecticut Yankee

Mark Twain is perhaps best known for his children's books, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Some forty years ago or so, I read one of his adult novels, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, the story of an American of the late 1800s traveling back in time to England to experience Medieval life. The only part I now remember is the Yankee saving his own skin by predicting a darkening of the daytime sky. The sun then blacked out on the day he predicted. The people were astounded. 

How was he able to do that? The event was a historically memorable solar eclipse that the Yankee had learned of during his life in America.

Samson & Delilah

Why did Delilah cut Samson's hair?