Passing through a Forest

Thornwood Lane can always remember me as an explorer. I recall years of my childhood investigating the forest grounds, my house passing in and out of view through the vertical blinds of tree trunks – thin ones and thick ones. I would search for signs of human contact, maybe a tossed out empty bottle from years back or a dropped package of mints, or just a piece of litter.

And sometimes I would find the skeletal remains of a forest dweller.

And sometimes I would find old molten rock.

All the time, I see myself nudging away from those fresher days. I jam my oar into the heavy sandy bank of my childhood, pushing my rowboat off into the greater depths of the later years. I think about those times when playing pretend games was admissible. Today, the game is getting to be like some horrible crime against my own honest self-awareness. It’s an honest self-awareness that recognizes that I am only a twenty-two year old boy riddled with issues and amounting to, as always, just another speck in the grander scheme of stuff – physical and/or otherwise.

But people always marvel over how “insignificant” we are simply because the universe is much bigger than the world we inhabit, which itself is so much larger than any single human being. But there are two problems with this idea. First of all, what does size have to do with significance? The universe began at a size much smaller than a human being. Matter is composed of crucial microscopic material. And this atomic and subatomic sized material is precisely the second point. We might be exponentially smaller than the universe, but we are also exponentially larger than the quarks comprising the universe. Why do we forget so often about the tiny bits of existence that would gawk at us with amazement if they were conscious? And maybe they are conscious. Maybe aliens the size of strings that run smaller than any subatomic particle are staring at me with wide eyes and mouths ajar as I stand before them in a forest of massive trees swaying in a powerful gusty wind, and I play chicken with a deer that for the first time in her life won’t run away when the twenty-two year old idiot that is me thumping my feet and flailing my arms and sounding a silly playful barbaric yawp.

Why can’t we be in the middle of the road? Why can’t we get over the fact that not being the biggest does not mean being the smallest?

Just remember that the universe could be staring at us the way we stare helplessly at a single coarse line of thread that just won’t slip into the tiny hole at the end of a needle. Our fingers are much too bulky and clumsy to understand the world of a needle.

And this. This is all passing.