Tag: infinity

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Falling Away to Depth, Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, Moki Dugway, State Road 21, Utah, United States of America

Falling Away to Depth

The mesa falls away
Into the depths of early evening
Low sun illuminates
Undulating canyons and buttes

Sedimented sandstone
Layers indicating a scale
Powerfully daunting
And exquisite

And I
Stopped halfway between
Floor and ceiling
Sense myself in the centre of aeons

Epochs pass
Every hundred steps or so
Up the trail

A hundred years
A thousand
A hundred thousand
A million

Unwinding time
As species come
And species go

Great, fearsome lizards
Ruled the known universe
For 165 million years

But only in the last tens of steps
Before the top
Do I walk in the footsteps
Of my most ancient ancestors
A paltry 6 or so million years ago

I am reminded
For all our accomplishments and cleverness
We are but toddlers on this Earth
Itself nothing more
Than a pale blue dot
Circling a minor star
Spiraling in an outer arm
Of one galaxy
In a universe dotted
With hundreds of billions

Layer upon layer
Of time and space
Stretch out to scales
Unimaginable

A few steps more
I stand atop the mesa
Returned to the time and place
That belongs to me now

Deep, heavy breaths
To gain my equilibrium
While scanning across the vista
Tallying a few hundred million years of strata

A snippet
In an existence billions of years in the making
Layer upon layer of time and space
To make this collection of sediments
Which seems so very vast and ancient
But is no more than a cosmic blip
In all that was
All that is
And all that will be

I feel small
Fleeting
Insignificant

Yet

Somehow

And nonetheless

Stupendously magnificent

Because in all this immensity
Stands me
A self-aware collection of molecules
Contemplating the inconceivable miracle
That is my own consciousness
Tucked away in some small backwater
Of eternal infinity

Just how fucking exquisite is that?

And the view up here is awesome.

The sun sets
Light falls away to darkness
But for the little beacon of light
That is me

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Monument Valley & Goosenecks State Park, Near Mexican Hat, Utah, United States of America

Details Details

I watch you
Taking in the wide oxbow landscape
A thousand feet deep
While I photograph the small details
Of tumbled stone and distant valleys

If you could embrace
The vastness of space
Then even a galaxy
Would be a minor detail
In the landscape of infinity

And I?
Not even a speck

To speak my insignificance
Demands more consideration
Than my infinitesimal displacement
Of time and space deserves

And yet
Here are we
The infinitesimal
Contemplating the infinite
Which I suppose
Is big enough
For me

Perhaps
Even…

Divine

Like the way a river
Has carved this earth
For millions of years
And left a canyon here
To pique our wonder

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Filtered Light, Chefchaouen, Morocco

Follow Me

Light filters down
To dim blue depths
Where it pools
In lazy patterns
Upon empty lanes
Marked here and there
With blood red tiles
And doors
While wicker lines the walls

I grab a basket
From a hook
Gather light
From the pools
To carry further
Into navy
And the black
Where deepest shadows lay

There I breathe
In dim recess
The light across
All wavelengths
Equal bright
Spirit-pure the white
With neither heat nor harm
To eyes which can now see
Beyond the self
The wall of me

I spy infinity within
Infinity without
And in between
A single point
Without space
Or time
To count
Not even
Infinitesimal
Amount