photo: ‘something single and solitary and perfect’
song: ben howard – “promise” [stream only] (buy)
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
‘somewhere, something amazing is waiting to be known.’ – carl sagan
my very first memory is from when i was three or four. i was with my family, we were outside and it must have been fourth of july because we had a big carton of sparklers. i remember watching mine burn and flash and bite in the summer air, the shrieks and laughs of my sisters echoing, and i remember being very, very still. i watched mine burn and die and i remember looking up at the moon. at that age, like most children, i pictured the moon as a slice of something that changed shapes. i didn’t understand that the moon stayed the same but our perception and view of it changed. and for some reason, as i stood there with my stump of sparkler, barefoot, i realized for the first time that the whole moon was there, i just couldn’t see all of it. i could see the crescent, and the very trace end of the sphere, but the majority of the moon was dark because i wasn’t in the right position to see the whole thing yet.
and that’s life. we see part of it, we’ve experienced part of it. part of it is tangible. many of us can see a trace outline of the end — we see goals and careers and maybe, eventually, getting married and having kids. but the middle part is so murky. a year from now, we could be somewhere completely different and we have no way of knowing. and it’s a little scary, a little unknown, a little adventurous. but it’s also sad, because in order to keep advancing the light across the surface of our lives, some things have to change.
