Perspective Salvation (Understanding Microscopic & Macrocosmic Scales To Save The Environment & Humanity)

Enlightenment Prompt #23

From on high, vast lakes

become tear-filled eyes; trees, the

hairs on a man’s arm.

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera while flying into Nice airport. Photo by Morgan Buchanan

Bonjour from France!

Our body is a world body that hosts millions of tiny organisms for whom we are the beginning and end of their perception. Do they explore the valleys and mountains of our form? Armpits and noses? Scalp jungle to toe crevasse? Now switch perspective to consider the land, the actual world as a body. What are we to it? Busy fleas, exploring its surface the way microorganisms or even parasites might explore us. Now what about the world as a flea in the body of the galaxy? The galaxy as a flea on the body of the universe? The idea that one of the small organisms that live in our eyebrows and feeds off dead eyebrow skin might imagine it is the all important centre of the universe seems ridiculous to us but then I’m sure the world feels much the same about us.

Demodex mites: These are eight-legged (that's right, they're related to spiders) parasites that can settle in our hair follicles and sebaceous glands. These microscopic mites live in human hair follicles, such as eyelashes, eyebrows, nose and ear hair, scalp, chest hair, armpits .

If we are stupid enough to wipe ourselves out with nuclear and biological weapons, it will inflict disproportionately massive damage to the body of the earth, relative to our biological importance to it. The earth will take some time to recover, maybe even thousands or tens of thousands of years, and in the scale of earth time that will be the equivalent of a sick day off work, and then it will just keep spinning and find equilibrium again. Animals and plants will find a way and life will go on. We’ll have missed our chance to show that we can be more than greedy frightened animals. So, a level of proportionality is important when considering our self importance. We’re big fish swimming in a small pond, and we’ve got to keep the vast, endless seas of the universe in mind. 

Perhaps correct perspective just might be enough to save us from ourselves. 

Of course we’re talking about external scale. Inner space is also vast and humbling (even frightening), but we must be as bold, perhaps even more bold, in our inner-exploration as we are in our external journeys. 

Bonus Content: Powers of Ten by Ray & Charles Eames

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC