Burke.Word

So, this is the first of what I hope will be very few “Monday Musings”, where I go to Politics & Prose after dropping off my wife (who’s teaching a private castanets class in Upper NW) and write something semi-pithy that, ideally, makes Larry Schlang smile. Now, I don’t want this to be “very few” because I hope my wife loses interest in castanet teaching, but rather because this whole blog thing makes me skeptical to begin with.

In any case, today’s subject? I’ll call it “Minuscule Me”. I’m currently teaching the 9th graders about the personal essay genre, and I have given them an assignment–discuss a time you had in nature that made you change your perspective on something–that I think maybe I should try to answer as well.

In 2003, my wife and I traveled to Ireland and I instantly fell in love with the entire country (Guinness had a small part to do with this, I suppose) as we moved around the whole coast. What hit me most about the place was the sense of history, of what real geologic time looks like. Too, the history of animosity, misplaced anger, belief-driven hate. But that’s another blog–Northern Ireland’s Portstewart is too big in my memory to belong here.

But there I was, tripping over the hexagonal stones of the Giants’ Causeway, staring at Scotland across the turbulent sea, and it dawned on me that I am very small. I have always needed these moments in my life. Part of the reason I went to Peace Corps in West Africa after college was that I was tired of being incapable of getting over myself, you know? Petty gripes and insignificant whinings began to define me and I grew pretty weary of that (even in my self-absorbed state). So, yes, the Causeway was the most beautiful and bewildering natural phenomenon I had ever seen–nothing in my tiny brain could comprehend how it grew out of the sea like it did and I began to obsess over the reality that time and its vastness, and how helpless that all makes me, should guide me in my approach to the world and how I want to live as a teacher and a writer. Significance should be measured in eons, not individual lifetimes, and I’ve grown to have a sense of calmness in that.

There was a fish trapped in amonst the stones of the Causeway and I imagine she knows (now anyway) what I’m talking about.

The next day I found myself pressed in fear against a stone ridge looking over the Cliffs of Moher feeling much the same thing. Then, however, I was more aware of wind than water, of falling freely into the great expanse of ocean beneath me, exhilerated to be flying on my own.

But, how wondrous is the bigness of the world around us, a world that could care less about our needs and little worries, a world that will go on after us without feeling any sense of loss at our absence? Strange, but I have come to feel great comfort in that, of belonging both inside and outside of time.

The world, and its weight, is not made heavier by me.