There's something

there's something about being somewhere far from home, maybe in the middle of the American midwest, with the horizon clearly in view, and the lights of cities strangely absent from the sky, or maybe in the kingdom of Kyrgyzstan, on a military base, at 2am, underneath a wooden and steel stage, fumbling around in the dark, trying to stretch your arm around one large metal object, stretching with all your strength, your other hand holding a weakening flash-light, almost powerless against the vast, convoluted darkness underneath this stage

that makes you feel small, a vanishing dot on a tv screen where the camera is soaring up, upward, drawing away from your face, until it can see your body sprawled out on the floor, and then the floor and the room itself, and it is drawing away farther, and you can see the surrounding wilderness, for wherever we are, we are surrounded by wilderness, and then a lurch farther upward, and you see millions of tiny lights dotting the darkened landscape of the earth at night, before the camera pulls away again into something that no human being has ever or really will ever comprehend

and in feeling small, like a fragment of driftwood tossed around in the massiveness of the ocean waves, rolling in from the night-time sea like ancestral monsters must have emerged from the depths and terrified the imaginations of our ancestors for millennia, in that great warm vastness, in the brutal cold emptiness

you feel warm, and held, and significant, like only in perceiving aloneness can we feel comfort, like the protective arm of reality only wraps around us at the instant we feel abandoned by it, like riding a bike because you're comfortable with your dad's guiding arm, only to look around and find him missing, and then in a panic, finding him holding you up once again

the smallness is comfort, the aloneness is significance, and when the thunder beats down on your roof, and you're alone in the middle of the desert, and there is no one who knows you for a thousand miles, then you know who you really are, and just how amazing it all can be