There is Nothing New Under the Sun... Except the Smallness of a World.

The swarm and unrelenting push and the constant barrage of the news and the media is making my world larger, but I don’t want it to be larger. I get lost in a world that is too large. The world is too much with me, so I stepped back and chose to remove myself from the matters of the larger, more confusing aspects. I have taken time to will my world to shrink, to grow smaller, but in seeking the smallness I have discovered the true largeness of it.

             

     In my own little patch of this immense planet I have found that the blue skies of a late spring afternoon yield a blue that no brush could dare duplicate. The way the sun slants across the sky and gently smudges the rays into a burnished gold stuns me in its simplicity and complexity. Every waking tree is busy pushing out fresh shoots, every new flower seedling unfurling to explode magically into purples and blues and crimson reds. These seemingly insignificant, but almost near miracles of an existence, occur year after year, decade after decade.

             

     Hiding away from screaming headlines of Boston Bombers, sequesters, rising health care costs, and deaths in Syria, I begin to take notice of what I have lately turned a blind eye to; a creeping caterpillar, a breeze that suddenly lifts like a sigh, the faint scent of newly bloomed jasmine, a raindrop shining on a dandelion leaf.  They each bring a new perspective to a year that has consistently spun me in circles again and again. They comfort me in their predictable adherence to the laws of the natural world.

              

      Away from the chaotic world of humankind, my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell have expanded to bring the softer world around me into sharp focus and clarity. The skies are more expansive, the shadows of the trees deeper, the sunlight more diffused.  Colors blend to create a Monet beginning. A Renoir backsplash. The rains push the scent of buried time from beneath the layers of packed earth and create a new promise. The flight of a single small sparrow against an azure sky becomes miraculous in its ease. Night sounds magnify into a twilight symphony that blend into an easy crescendo. All of these are new, yet not new. The world spins, babies are born, flowers bloom and then wither, men and women wish and dream, love tangles and untangles, horizons go on without end, and the sun sets gold, orange and red.  They happen over and over again. Timeless in their predictability. And none of them matter, and all of them matter.

             

     A year can go by so quickly, yet the happenings in a year can exact a furious toll. Some scenes of the past year, like ones from a play, I foresaw, but most I didn’t. Most knocked me down in their jolting fury. But I got back up. And my friends and loved ones got back up. The world got back up. And we went on because there is simply no other choice.

            

      This upcoming year, now that I expect the unexpected, will bring other changes I can't even begin to suppose: heartaches, triumphs, joys, tears, sublime quiet moments, and rip roaring deafening ones. On a grander scale wars will begin and end; nature will do her work both beautiful and destructive; debates will be won and lost; leaders will shift, die, or just disappear from our attentions; agendas will be proposed and disposed; and men will kill for no other reason than they can. And we will be troubled and disheartened for a mere tick of the clock. And in the time it takes the second hand to move, I will once again disengage from the largeness and the loudness of the world. I will step into the small/largeness of a world that does and does not matter; a world that changes so slowly that mountains are carved away by a single grain of sand and a baby’s tears form an ocean.