Geodes
I went into a cave this week. It was one of those tourist trips, an hour or so of being guided along a trail to look at stalagmites, stalactites, and various other underground formations.
It’s certainly awe inspiring to look at the beautiful crystalline structures and contemplate the millions of years they spend in the making. God came along with me, she said that it was good sometimes to see these things through human eyes. When I asked what she meant by that she said it was an issue of scale. Really a cave is a lot like a geode, only bigger. They’re both just formations within a spherical space. One of them is small enough for us to hold in our hand and the other is big enough for us to wander around inside.
Since God has the whole universe and more as her perspective she has to make a conscious effort to come down and experience things at our scale. It’s sort of like if we could not just try to imagine being an ant crawling around inside a geode but could actually become an ant crawling around inside one.
And for God there’s any number of different scales to wander around in. She can spelunk inside an atom or stand in awe inside a planet. She sometimes wanders from one galaxy to the next the way we go from room to room. I asked her what her favorite was, but she demurred, she said each experience had its own charms and had to be taken for its own values.
Later, though, she did tell me that it was too bad we could never have the sorts of senses that would let us really see the beauty inside a black hole. So yeah, some differences are just matters of scale but some are completely different games. I just do my best to try and know which is which.
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