All Creatures Great and Small

A few years ago I walked 43 miles of the Appalachian Trail in central Pennsylvania. I have many reasons for wanting to get my feet back on the roots and rocks of the trail, but perhaps chief among them is the desire to break out of the artificial box I construct for myself as I maneuver through the concrete cityscape aspect of my life.

I suspect that I need to get closer to the earth itself to refresh my mind and memory to all the small marvels that move about with quiet intention all around my feet. Whole worlds of tiny beings seem to go about their important business, oblivious of my presence or even my existence. You can’t see any of this from the window of a speeding car.

The big things, like the mighty Susquehanna River, or a powerful midnight storm, or even the splendid beauty of the rolling hills of cultivated farmland, do generally catch the eye and cause us to stop in quiet wonder, but it is the smaller things of the land, the insects and tiny creatures when viewed through the lens of the poetic imagination that suggest order and resolve and purpose rather than inscrutability and aimless disorder. For me the trail suggests coherence, but I need to slow down to see it at work and that requires that I put aside my singular drive to get from here to there. So give me the trail any day, for it provides me with bigger themes through the miracle of its smallest creatures: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth....For he spoke and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.”