Playing Fair and Being Kind

LOOKING INTO CANYONS

I’ve looked up at walls of ocean more than a hundred feet high rushing toward shores hundreds of miles away. I, lying with my back pressed against the steel of my protection, eyes wide and mouth shouting, Holy shit! Tons of ocean racing under storm and wind and dark, over and past me to a future where the beast would arrive tamed to fill the sand pails of children on sunny beaches on sunny days.

I’ve stood on mountains in Virginia staring across the blue, smoky ridge shapes disappearing in value across distance where I could feel the earth’s rotation and the pull of the moon on the back of my neck.

I’ve heard a chorale in a place of worship sung so perfectly that cosmic tears flew from my eyes and love so deep choked my throat with awe. My chest was so filled with the presence of the cosmos I could barely contain an adjoining scream.

Once I maneuvered a bathyscaphe in perpetual midnight over an underwater ridge down a slope into a caldera long inactive and now just an immense bowl of yellow sand. The ancient hole in the ocean sat waiting patiently, perhaps a million years or more and I was its first guest ever. I acknowledged its superiority over me and bid it adieu. I wish you could have seen it. I’ll bet my tracks are still there.

I’ve searched for and witnessed two “green flashes” while scanning a western horizon filled with cherries, peaches, oranges, and fruit of the tropics. A few moments after the sun had vanished below the edge of the world a green light flew across the sky in a blink and filled the periphery of my being and blew my hair from my face. I could hear waves of light mixed with waves of the ocean to become waves kissing my skin. Each green flash left me filled by the presence of discovery and mystery.

Nothing I have ever witnessed nor felt nor experienced will match those I have been a part of when I stop my traveling, halt my motion, belay my activities long enough to take a look inside myself. On those occasions when I did, I have been overwhelmed to my core, filled with the fear of unknowns, buried in doubts and disgust and discouragement at how small I truly am. And then the space opens and I am again filled with fear and overwhelmed with the unknowns of how truly immense the world inside me is. It is this dichotomy of dimension that scares the bejesus out of me. At once I am out in space and then I am crushed by all that surrounds me.

I’ve been to many places in adventurous ways but the place that fills me with awe is the space inside me the size of a pea. A pea that contains the cosmos.

G. M. Goodwin

April 30, 2016