Above and Beyond 9/17/2023

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

I had an existential moment recently. It started, as many of my random trains of thought do, on a ride taking my daughter to school in the morning.  I think it is because of the timing. Something about dawn and dusk really tend to speak to me. I don’t know if it is the special quality of the light. Perhaps it is the possibility of seeing a beautifully colored sky. Or maybe it is some interesting mixture of both that light and color with the occasional mist that adds an ethereal glow. I don’t know exactly what it is, but if I am going to trapse about in the little tucked away corners of my mind, it’s going to very likely be during one of those time periods. It is because of this that my daughter’s journeys to school tend to be far deeper than anticipated. She is fine when I share with her though. Sometimes she is even intrigued.  Often, she looks at me as though I have decided to wear my shoes as a hat when I express some of my thoughts. You never know.

In my area, there are very large amounts of open land. Let me add that there is a large amount of forested area as well.  In case you have missed my previous blogs things are very rural for me as the two previous sentences would imply.  Anyway, I once heard someone say that in this part of the south you don’t see a lot of wide-open spaces. This person was supposedly an expert as they were teaching graduate level college courses about this part of the country specifically.  Now, no, we do not have Kansas or Oklahoma levels of endless flat plains, but we do have hay fields and pastureland and it can go on for quite some distance with nothing but grass. Yes, it is bordered by forest, so you don’t just have views of miles of nothing but ground and sky, but we do have immense expanses. 

In saying all that, I pass by many of these open areas upon my morning commute.  There are occasions, and recently happens to have several of said occasions, when you can look up and the openness overtakes you.  With the vast expanse of sky overhead you can almost imagine that the curve of the planet is visible to the naked eye. You can feel just how huge the firmament is and just how terribly tiny you are in comparison. And when there are many layers to the clouds, some that seem to be wisps of vapor low enough to touch, then massive, towering thunderheads that look to be miles high, you grasp just how far this expanse stretches.  And if you’re lucky enough to see all this at night and in a place that isn’t overly lit artificially, well, the stars. We all know that we can’t count them, but it is far easier to wrap your head around that fact when you look up and they are everywhere in all levels of brightness, blanketing you from above. 

I talked to my daughter about this and told her that one night we should take a quilt out and lay on the ground and just look up. I told her that seeing the night sky when lying flat on the earth is a totally different experience. She seemed excited by the idea of something out of the ordinary for us to do. But then again, I know her, I know she might revel in the awesomeness of it all for five minutes. Then she’ll probably want to know if there will be s’mores included in this outdoor escapade. And that is fine. I cannot expect no matter how wise beyond her years she may be, a seven-year-old to wax poetic about her place in the universe. At least not without chocolate.

But it’s hard to look up and not feel small. And as I type that, it sounds as though I mean I feel insignificant. Which in the grand scheme of things I suppose I am. But then again, I’m not. While yes, I am but a speck in a limitless universe, I am also the only one of me that exists. There is not another human in that immensity that is exactly like me. So, I suppose while I am but a grain of sand on an infinite beach, my Creator saw fit to make me a part of it. There are worlds and galaxies that we have yet to even fathom, I mean really, we haven’t even examined all the parts of our own planet yet much less any others.  But even knowing that, we all are such integral parts of the existence of all of it.  If we weren’t then why are you and I exactly the way we are?  Why isn’t anyone else identical?  Obviously, there was a reason for both your and my presence in the time and place in which we are.  If you look at everything as one giant piece of art, which really and truly it absolutely is, each speck of paint or stroke of brush is pivotal to make the full masterpiece what it is.

I am always caught off guard when this type of thing strikes me. It’s just a ride I have made a million times. I’m just taking my child to school. I am only looking at the same fields and trees I have looked at for well over thirty years. But I suppose when the sky is lit just so and a low hanging cloud catches my eye then, on occasion, the child in my passenger seat isn’t the only one that is on their way to an education.