There is a perception that holiday seasons, especially Christmas, produce an excess of moments that feel almost miraculous. Moments that seem made for the word awesome at it's most literal sense.
We feel cynical and jaded at a world that is too loud, too violent, too sharp against the soft edges of our innocence to truly feel in awe of the world.
My husband is described as a well-grounded realist, if one is kind, and a sarcastic cynic, if one is honest. As you might imagine, it takes a lot to fill him with awe. But today? Today had moments that were awesome.
We went to the New York Public Library and there, unexpectedly, we got to see a Gutenberg Bible. It's meticulous illumination work and intriguing hand lettered margin notes left us both in a state of profound awe. The historical significance of this book from 1456, there right in front of us here, made us walk in thoughtful contemplation, pondering mhow society shifted so massively in the post-Gutenberg world.
To pair this, then, with the Museum of Natural History with its timeline of human origins
and the 10:26 scale representation in the Rose Centre was nothing short of mind blowing. Time, distance, importance of humanity? How relative we were, how insignificant our worries, how trite our lives felt against the magnitude of space, the infinitesimally fragments of all the known world.
And so, pondering the greatness of everything, we walked together in the rain through Central Park,
and took in the lighting of the Rockefeller Tree 
and understood that our place in the world couldn't be understood in simple ways but would be endured in simple joys, together. And that fact settled inside me, a kernel of surety in a life that so often has none.
And that? Is awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment