Seeing

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

William Blake

This week, a New York Times editorial, "A Track in the Snow"
brought that poem back to mind.

I was walking in my dog in the park with my iPod on yesterday and
realized that I needed to shut it off. There was so much I was
missing, or rather, it was the silence itself that I needed to
pay attention to.

Normally this walk is a decompression time. Of course, it usually
takes 10 minutes or so for the fresh air to infiltrate my brain.
I walk until my breath starts to normalize, my to-do list stops running over in my
head, and I start to see patterns and processes of nature. If I'm wound up enough,
usually these thoughts run back to my research and classes, but at least I know that
I've been grounded again; the models and experiments and hypotheses have had a chance
to rub up against the truth of what is around me.

On a daily basis, I could only hope to see "eternity in a grain of sand." For now I'm
content if by the time that my earlobes are beginning to feel the burn of the wind,
my eyes are following the line of the hills, noticing the emergence of spring.