What we think we know...

I watched out my window.

The brown hills rose up like the backs of basking cows, the patches of white snow in bovine pattern , liked spilled milk, shone in the afternoon sun. These sleeping, heaped cows lay penned in by the gothic, ragged cathedral of stone cliffs, layered and scored by years of sediment and the elements carving their designs. As I drove past them, winding along, my toes still numb from a day recreating in the snow, I suddenly thought of how small I was and how fleeting- like the melting drifts of snow, surrounded by ancient giants of landscape. Just a flea lost in cow fur who thinks he is central to the universe, but who would not live to see even a few inches of erosion or change in the setting. Pull out further and the hills are mere pimples on the backside of an old earth groaning slowly through space, rotating to keep time with infinity and taking us to our inevitable future from season to season. What do we even know, as small as we are- can we even comprehend what we claim to know about our place in the galaxy? Anymore than a dust mite living in our eyelashes knows about us, as a whole bodied human with all the complex workings of organs and systems and seasons of our own? Sure, he can see the hair, may know how to gather sustainance there and thinks he has it all worked out in his life span of a day...but how can he know what he doesn't realize he doesn't know?

I am rambling. But, I had a conversation with my children once about this very thing. Can we be living in the eyebrow of God, so to speak, and claim he isn't there because all we see is the eyebrow and we think we have that all figured out? Do our dust mites believe in us? Or do they merely exist, survive, thinking that what they see and experience is the extent of reality? I suppose I could never presume to say that something or some "One" out there couldn't exist. The hubris we humans have...the specks who know a few things and jump to all sweeping conclusions...as we proudly decipher part of the code in our rudimentary labs, with our plastic toy instruments, we ignore that that code was written and programmed by something bigger and smarter than we are. Why? Has anyone ever sat and listened to the intricate flowing sounds of a symphony coordinating harmonies and imagined it "just happened"?
Anyway, it is funny what can set my mind off on random tangents. The world is a beautiful and thought provoking place- and as one flea to another- don't be afraid to explore the possibilitites and keep an open mind. There is more to all of this than meets the eye.

Maybe all we know is not what we think we know.