Insect world

I love pulling into new towns. Once I get within city limits of any sort of town I turn off my iPod and just observe. The city parks, the sun's reflection on windows, the fashion of the inhabitants, different mom and pop stores, style of homes, its all just so interesting. Every town is someplace different, its someones home.
I can never quite fathom that as I drive by homes lit up at night. Each dwelling has a different family, different life experience, jobs, desires, passions, favorite foods, achievements. There's nothing like travelling to serve up a good dollop of healthy insignificance.

I lay down stretching on a patch of grass with some rare shade (the prairies are pretty flat and mostly treeless, who knew) and got looking at the bugs. I always find it interesting that if you get your head close to the ground its like another world opens up to you, the insect world. Here you see things that you wouldn't ever really see or care about going about your day to day business. But this area matters to these ants, beetles, mosquitoes, and worms. They mill about getting sustenance for their day and building their homes until some unsuspecting bloke like myself smothers them when stretching his quadriceps out. Dang does that quadricep stretch feel good.
Its a bit how I feel on this trip of mine. I bike and bike and bike and bike and then reach some town where I bend down and take a look at all these different people milling about living life and getting sustenance and building their homes. They feel like, in the words of Death Cab, "all different names for the same place".
Perhaps that same place is simply, "not home".

I don't miss home, I get to travel! And I love getting to poke around different people's homes and find the great cafes, parks, and local beer. But it does give you a sense of healthy insignificance. I do not matter to any of these people. My life could end and they would not care one bit. They wouldn't even know. Unless I chose to end it dangling off their front porch or stuffing myself in their freezer or something. "Honey Ill get you some Eggos from the fr.... OH MY GOODNESS!"
Morbid thoughts over.
And that's in a country with a pretty small chunk of population all things considered. 33 million. That's like a drop in the ocean of humanity. A very beautiful tasty drop, but still a drop. It's enough to make someone feel quite small. And that is a wonderful thing.

You meet people now and then who have never left their immediate surroundings. I lived in a neghbourhood where some of the kids had never been outside of the 8 blocks radius surrounding their homes. And you can sort of tell sometimes. A nursing friend of mine thought it should be mandatory for people to take a year and travel before going into nursing school to get some healthy perspective on life. The world does not revolve around you. People think differently from you and that's OK. The way you do things is not "normal", just societal.
I think travelling merely forces you to do that (unless your idea of travelling is resort hopping). But we can all get our head out of the clouds any day, anywhere and be in relationship with the people that are around us. Realize that the world does not revolve around you. People think different from you and that's OK, they may even be right! And the way you do things is not "normal", just societal.

A friend (thanks Kyla) gave me a book called Insurrection by Peter Rollins just before I left on my trip, today I was reading an excellent observance of what love is and does in said book which sort of relates and I sort of just want to quote.

"This is what love does. It does not make itself visible but, like light, makes others visible to us. In a very precise sense, then, love's presence cannot be described as existing, but rather is that which calls others into existence... love does not stand forth and vie for our attention but rather brings others forth. When we love, our beloved is brought out of the vast, undulating sea of others. Just as the Torah speaks of God calling forth beings from the formless ferment of being, so love calls our beloved our from the endless ocean of undifferentiated objects." 

I guess this sticking our head down and looking at what's there, be it bugs, towns, or people we are in contact with, is a sort of love. It is an acknowledgment of their existence. What we can otherwise ignore, we choose to bring out from that vast sea of others. I have time to acknowledge this country. Maybe you only have time to acknowledge your neighbours cat. We are incredibly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But we are also grandly significant to the scheme of other things.

Get your heads down in the grass. But if you are in Saskatchewan I will warn you, there are alot of bugs.