My grandfather was a farmer. “Son, don’t let your head grow higher than a corn stalk.” He knew the difference between hubris and humility.
For a few weeks in the winter before the sun swings westerly in its axis, it plays magic tricks on a certain ornate porcelain vase on the sideboard. The vase is about 14 inches tall, has a small opening at the top and a three-inch gilded base. But its consistency is still clay.
It’s mesmerizing to watch the sun transmute the small vase into an enormous, almost grotesque, caricature of itself by a simple shadow cast upon the wall, lighting a little hour, then disappearing. Nature’s alchemy. The vase then returns to its proper self. Have fun metaphorizing this legerdemain of nature.
It got me to thinking about the dimensions the average human footprint makes upon the face of this planet. Think about it…standing erect, maybe a two-foot square? And when we were born, how much did we weigh? Many not much more than an economy-sized sack of stone ground grits. Sobering as well as humbling.
We begin tenure here in a miniscule way, but we grow. Like the vase, we have discovered creative ways and means of enlarging our imprints far beyond their normal occupancy upon the dust. Staggering.
Where are these exaggerated footprints found? Examine the Universe some starry night. Caucus with Musk, Bezos, commune with Hawking, Bacon, Galileo, Einstein, Trump. Oops, a typo. We have the capacity to be bigger than we know, despite the humble, tiny beginning. Ask any politician.
Who can remember their first few hours, days or weeks after birth? We don’t even resemble the baby pictures we see. But that’s when we internalize the urge to become the center of the universe, effectively attempting to control all life in our surroundings. In other words, we got big quick.
How? You guessed it…the tongue and vocal cords. We discovered these small members that can command and boast great things. And while we are all created equal, at least in sharing the air we breathe, certainly some tongues are more equal and adept than others to garner an audience.
See it now. The family is gathered around the baby’s crib, listening to gaga gaga babble. Who’s in charge here? Or let this baby get hungry, its tongue filling the room with screams. Attention is guaranteed. The tongue is a powerful builder of enlarged foundations.
The tongue doesn’t stop with baby babble. It discovers how to amply itself as it matures. It’s a universal truism: The older I get, the better I was. It’s not hard to get replaced.
Life leads us down strange paths where we discover platforms that increase an ever-expanding and widening control of our environment. We learn early the amplified capacities of the impulsive id and the vast landscape available for the unrestrained ego to conquer and possess. Soon our footprint grows and often gets top heavy. The stride may get longer, but the footprint is the same.
But while we stroll life’s paths, picking up sticks and stones for building materials, we fail to notice we also scatter seeds in our passing, seeds that will soon grow and will either support our building progress or produce thorns and briars that will mar our passage.
We find it possible to augment our lowly beginnings with pen and ink, computer keystrokes, and digital twitter-speak. Such blueprints contemplate building our castles on the shifting sands of social media. It’s possible to grow enormously popular or hideously reviled with a YouTube video or a clever tweet. Hyperbole is our sword for warding off all competitors.
But even as we can increase our beginnings, we find out that life is a bell curve. What goes up comes down. Unless you die at the top. Life has its own ways to reduce us to size. Lately the Covid outbreak is doing a pretty good job of keeping us grounded.
Sooner or later, we find ourselves back on our little corner, reduced to our original tendency. We come to realize the magic of shadows, but they’re still just shadows. Our consistency is also just clay.
I leave you with this Middle Eastern benediction: “May your shadow always be a long one.”
January 29, 2021
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