little worlds

Henry and I have been walking every morning with Chaucer into Rutland State Park during this April vacation. It is very different walking with Henry. He brings with him his own presence... a light and indomitable... and chatty presence. As we were walking we found a little, hanging piece of moss. I thought to myself, this moss has it's own presence, sitting here, waiting for God knows what. We all live within our own little worlds, and as we bring each of them into intersection with each other, things get bounced around, pushed away, or sometimes they merge.
This one tiny piece of moss has a whole family of cells devoted solely to the life of the moss. Endless arrays of microorganisms might take their homes there. Insects: midges, mosquitoes, fruit flies, ants, aphids, myriad lives may take up residence here. And I calmly and callously pick it up and look into it without seeing anything at all. My life intersects with an enormous amount of other worlds as I walk through the park. Some take high offense, like the blue

herons that immediately take to the air as they see me on the road, and others seem not to mind at all. It's these intersections and the randomness of it all that packs the excitement of exploration full of meaning. This is why those early explorers pushed into the woods, and still why men encase themselves in steel and air and drop into the sightless depths of the ocean. I choose to meet these worlds in the relative wild of the park and not in the mall where these interactions take on another flavor entirely.

db