The whole of nature in its beauty

by DRM

A human being is part of a whole…[but] he expe­ri­ences him­self, his thoughts and feel­ings as some­thing sep­a­rate from the rest…This delu­sion is a kind of prison for us, restrict­ing us to our per­sonal desires and to affec­tion for a few per­sons near­est to us. Our task must be to free our­selves from this prison by widen­ing our cir­cle of com­pas­sion to embrace all liv­ing crea­tures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein

When the lunar mis­sions burst from the atmos­phere and left the hori­zon in their wake, the astro­nauts reported an over­whelm­ing sense of awe at the sight of our planet.

They were expe­ri­enc­ing tran­scen­dence as a phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. They had lit­er­ally tran­scended their own world.

They were small, dis­con­nected, hum­bled by the incred­i­ble beauty.

They brought back one of the most pro­found arti­facts of human exis­tence: the photo of Earth.

It is unique in our expe­ri­ence of the uni­verse. Look at the photo and you can feel it teem­ing with life: the col­ors are vivid, the great expanses of water and earth burst­ing with energy.

This is the whole Ein­stein felt.

As I write I look out over our gar­den. A yel­low but­ter­fly flits about. My two dogs rest qui­etly, a lit­tle apart. Two black­birds flap across the yard. A hawk coasts high above.

This is just a infin­i­tes­i­mal por­tion of the rich inter­con­nected life that makes up our world.

There’s a great rev­o­lu­tion under­way of shar­ing and aware­ness. It is enabled by the Inter­net. I know more of more peo­ple than at any other point in my life. I dis­cover like inter­ests. I expe­ri­ence affir­ma­tion in my expe­ri­ence of the world through the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers. I am sur­prised and delighted in ways that I never imagined.

Some­times I’m wea­ried by it all, but I never turn away for long. This is the stuff of Life.

Look­ing at Earth from space tells us about our incred­i­ble poten­tial. It is the key that unlocks our per­sonal prisons.