Of all this vast world, what fills you most with awe, wonder, amazement? Is it the great expanses of space and time, or tiny ones? Is it looking up, or looking down?
I’m contemplating all this today as I hike up the steep Saint Perpetua Trail high above the Oregon coast. Last week I was a guest living among the giant, ancient redwoods. Today the vast spaces of the coast are stretched out before me, but my eye is drawn down instead to the magnificence of the tiny wildflowers.
We learn from the mathematics of fractals how patterns in nature repeat themselves no matter how large or small the scale.
My teacher Reb Shlomo taught that there are different ways of learning. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. Sometimes it happens in one infinite moment.
When she was six years old my daughter Noe said to me, “Dad, did you know that kids know as much as adults?”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah!” she said. “We just know different things!”
The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote: “The butterfly counts not months but moments. And has time enough.”