Mainly on the plain...

There's something pretty powerful about looking at the radar and seeing a swatch of red and yellow stretching all the way back towards Texas, looking up at the clouds and rain spitting down at you, and connecting the images with reality. Yeah, it was that kind of profundity running through my head today, after all...we only spent 3 hours digging so I had plenty of time to philosophize.

Thinking about the power of a single storm stretching a thousand miles, or standing in a field that would soon be sowed with seed and growing the crops we all depend upon; these crops depending upon this same water. It was kind of profound...thinking about that cycle of interdependency that leads to everything in this valley around me, thousands of pelicans, snow geese, even eagles flying over head. That rain soaking me, making me miserable, was what created all of this, even the hills rising on either side were actually bluffs carved through water erosion, the field fertile through alluvial action.

I was reminded of a story Douglas Adams would recount when he was waxing philosophical...I'm too lazy to use the googles, but I'll retell it, besides I like telling stories.

A puddle wakes up one morning, yawns and blinks, looking around at his surroundings. He ponders his world, the hole he finds himself in, thinking "wow, what a wonderful hole there is here, it's so amazing that it has been made just so that it fits perfectly to my form."

While I believe the original story then goes off to an apocalyptic theme, I'd like to stop it right there...that is exactly the mindset I was in while oggling the sky thinking how everything just fit together. I consider myself an intelligent sort, but even I didn't really notice myself limited in my perspective, limited to a very shallow beauty. Instead I was just thinking how everything just seemed to fit (or was nearly made to fit), I then moved on thinking of how life is liquid...stretching and conforming to the shapes and pressures of its container. I find that even more beautiful and powerful. That complexity reliant on totally different resources, deep sea vents providing life - drawing chemicals out of the rupturing mantle, the "lungs of the earth" in the Rain forest, pumping carbon dioxide from the air providing oxygen for biodiversity across the globe, microbes surviving the vacuum of space surviving on the Apollo spacecrafts...as Dr. Ian Malcolm would say, life...finds a way. *stutter and stammering endearingly*

Instead of everything "fitting," as is so tempting to think when taken away by pure power and beauty, what we see is clawed...kicked and scratched...out of whatever is available. You can't help but think that if tomorrow sulfuric acid were to rain from the clouds, replacing all the water on earth...in 4 billion years there would be something. And I would bet, complex...microbes breaking the acid down into another compound, fungi breaking that down, and so on and so on...creatures and plants filling every crevice, bursting their vessel at the seams. Not because the vessel was made for them...but because life made itself fit. Life...finds a way.