Philosophy concepts and applications

Star-Gazing: The Story of the Earth in a Moment, as Reflected in the Five Senses

The sight or image of the earth is reflected in miniature. It is an orb like the fire of the pinpoints of light before the arm like reaching of the trees spreading out against the graying sky of dusk. These only seemingly small stars gaze cold, gold and twinkling in comparison to the true, great, and life-giving texture of the grass.

The grass is soft and slightly warm, smelling of mulch and living things, breathing like the living things that make up the earth's ever-growing green web and texture of flora and fauna. These textures are soft to the pressing human hand but are also scratchy if one reaches too far and fingers thorns, as one is apt to, if one strokes too hard. A scar born of a moment's carelessness, a birth of blood, a crease on the skin.

The earth was born like a rock, a stone, cast off from a splitting sun but it grew wet, mossy, and filled with teeming life. Microorganisms, to their own selves as huge as planets or solar system stars creep now within the loam and the mulch. The earth is reborn symbolically in the form of these organisms everyday, in the variegated folds and crevices of rock and loam -- even the smell of rot gives life to something, even the charred remains smells like a star, like carbon, life's elemental energy that is regenerated on a daily basis.