To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough.*
Maria Popova

We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you – what you see is not your environment, it is you.**
Thich Naht Hanh

We can get caught up in recycling hard plastics,
Taking one-use plastics back to the supermarkets,
Wondering about whether we should try for an
electric vehicle, but in a universe like ours,
There’s always a bigger picture,
And we may want to take a few steps back to
take it all in, perhaps finding ourselves undone, or
is it recovered, by what we find? –
And it’s very special.

The verb God used when he asked Moses to remove his shoes was the ancient word for an animal shedding its skin. God said, “Shed your shoes.”^

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Universe in Verse 2022: What Is Life? (no longer available);
**Seth Godin’s The Carbon Almanac;
^Hasidic student, from David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.