To see the bees pollinating
On my drive home from an errand this afternoon I stopped at a park I visited during my first few days of moving to LA.
It’s a beautiful park right in Santa Monica. You can see a glimpse of the ocean but it’s about a mile or so from the beach.
I took a second to bathe in the sun and simply enjoy the time on a grass field amongst city living.
In these moments of being alone and present, we notice things that we don’t usually do.
We appreciate the small things.
In this case, it was seeing the bees pollinate the flowers.
This made me think of the opening to a William Blake poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
I then Googled an analysis of this William Blake poem. These words felt like a powerful way to appreciate the world if you look closely and I wanted to learn the meaning behind the phrases he wrote.
I found this on enotes:
The foundations of our planet is rock and water. Sand represents both entities. These grains are tiny bits of rock that have been worked upon by the centuries-long action of water. So, yes, they are indeed representative of the world, in the physical sense.
And if you look at a handful of sand, you can see variety and diversity in the size and shape and origin of the particles – mirroring the range of people who populate our earth.
It’s funny, I go to the beach nearly everyday for my DMN8 workouts, and I never have taken a second to appreciate all the sand that was generated from the ocean and rock hitting over millions of years.
That water and rock are the fundamental building blocks of our planet!!!
But more importantly, it is the metaphor behind the sand.
We are the grains of sand that coalesce to the whole (human civilization). Each grain of sand is unique; but the all the unique pieces of sand make all of us as one.
It’s paying attention to these details that can help ground our minds into the state of the world and how we fit into it.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
To see the bees pollinating