A quick journal drop today. One of those quiet moments that somehow feels like it stretches across timelines.
What I want to talk about is scale—not in terms of measurement, but of perception and awareness. It’s the difference between a grain of rice and a mountain of it. Between a single bacterium and a bustling city. Between one tear and the entire ocean of human emotion.
You know that old parable—the one where the advisor asks the king to be paid in rice, doubling the grain on each square of a chessboard? The king laughs, until the grains become warehouses halfway already. That’s the deceptive power of scale: it doesn’t ask for your attention—it demands it eventually.
Microscopes, Telescopes, and the Middle Space
But I wasn’t thinking of numbers this morning when I looked out the window. I was thinking of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch lens-maker who obsessively peered into the microscopic world—an early pioneer of “seeing the unseen,” much like how modern AI and data visualization now reveal patterns and layers of reality once hidden to the naked eye. He didn’t invent bacteria—he discovered what had always been there. We were never alone; we were just blind.
And now? We’re zooming the other way. Telescopes stretching across space-time. Multiverse theories. Dark matter. Plausible impossibilities. We keep reaching out—outward, upward—maybe not just to learn, but to not be alone.
And somewhere in that cosmic grasping is a paradox I can’t shake: loneliness as origin. The divine loneliness—not merely an emotional void, but a creative impulse. A silence so vast it longed to be answered, to echo with something more than itself. A force—call it God, Source, Universal Consciousness—that yearned, and so it created. Not out of power, but out of longing. And what it made—what we are—is love as an answer to that ache.
Not just romantic love. Presence. Connection. A refusal to let the universe echo back silence.
The ESC Key and the Irony of Escape
And then came a small, strange moment just now—perfectly timed, like the universe giving me a wink. My son brought a keyboard to the small shack we have out back—one of those cheap ones with loose keys. Apparently, the ESCAPE key had broken off. And somehow, in a subtle twist of irony, that key ended up blocking the door from closing. The literal ESCAPE key—physically preventing an exit.
As if even the idea of escape comes with its own resistance. As if disconnection (when forced) might just jam the door.
There’s a weird poetry to that. A quiet reminder that escape isn’t always the answer. Or maybe that we can’t close off the world until we deal with what’s broken. Or perhaps love, even in the form of a stuck door and a loose plastic key, has a way of rewriting the story.
Final Whisper
There are scales we’ll never fully comprehend—like trying to hear the hum of a galaxy while tuning a violin, or reading emotions off the wings of a fruit fly. There are patterns that loop between the microscopic and the cosmic. Between lonely gods and loving humans. Between chessboards and tears.
And sometimes, the ESCAPE key gets in the way—but maybe that’s exactly what keeps us present.
To be seen. To see. To stay.
That might be enough for today.
What's on your mind?