phoebird
Oh the afternoon light before the storm
There are moments—and they never occur in the city—moments when it’s driven home to us that we are standing on the surface of a planet. We are incredibly small and the span of our lives is inconsequential and we’re standing on the surface of a planet. A planet that’s four and a half billion years old, a planet warmed and illumined by energy traveling ninety-three million miles from the sun. Some of that light is obstructed by the visible masses of condensed water vapor that enshroud the planet. Even the smallest of those masses can carry five to six hundred tons of water vapor—five to six hundred tons—and there are thousands of such masses hanging overhead, most of them very large. We are standing on the surface of a planet, nearly one-fifth of which is covered by grasses, grasses fed by heavy globules of water vapor and by the energy that’s traveled so many millions of miles, grasses that have grown on the planet for at least eighty million years.
We are small and the span of our lives is inconsequential, we are standing in tall grasses on the surface of a planet, and soon water will fall from the sky.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
