Bubba Hears A Who

Uncle Bubba was laid up in his hammock under cypress and swamp maple trees. He closed his eyes and an unrestrained breeze whisked across his exposed skin. Through his eyelids he could perceive the brilliant sunlight dancing through the green canopy in the cloudless blue sky. Then his eyes cracked open and he squinted, staring up through the delicate green foliage into that blue endlessness. It was then that he had one of those profound moments when one realizes that we are on this tiny round speck floating around in space. It is right there, beyond the tree tops; space. In our daily perspective is derived from our upright posture always looking forward rather than up. We lay prone in our beds at night, in the dark, looking at the ceiling. We avoid the perspective of living in an enormous galaxy of 400 billion stars and their planets which is 100,000 light years across. It never crosses our minds that the only thing that separates us from deep space is our atmosphere that we see only as that brilliant blue sky; and adding clouds only clouds our vision; it’s too much for our egocentric minds.

So our focus is on our puny little lives. We pompously debate issues such as global warming instead of taking care of our own backyard. We think that our use of chemicals to fight bugs, keep a green lawn, a clean house, our eggs from sticking to the pan and our hair in place is so small that it could never an mount to anything dangerous. We drive by the litter on the sides of our roads and shake our heads at the contempt of the litter bugs, but we never stop and pick it up. We spend billions of dollars on research to discover things we really don’t want to know or heed. We fight wars and wait for poor people to fail so we can swoop in and take what little they have. We separate ourselves by race, religion, and economics; never thinking that we are living on a speck floating in space. Who do we think we are?