Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Questions and Holes


Most of the time, I try to understand everything through science.  I want to understand the wavelengths of light we don't see with our eyes, the light that makes our flowers prettier to butterflies and bees.  I desire to know why squirrels and chipmunks run from me in the woods, and why their bones are built just so.  How long has the water I pumped from my well been coursing deep underground?  How does a whirligig beetle determine the direction of its spin?  Why don't deer sing like meadowlarks?  Is there a good reason why they shouldn't?
Is there a place where the clouds stop moving?
How, chemically, does love arrive and depart?
In the strictest science of things, we, and all that surrounds us, are primarily open space.  The atoms comprising the densest stone I ever lifted in my hand are a dither of tiny particles flung free to dance in holes and cavernous space.  They are not, as I once imagined, packed like sardines inside a can.   If I could take a single atom from the metal of one of our kitchen spoons, and somehow enlarge the atom until the electrons were the size of baseballs, I would have to walk a mile or so away from the nucleus to find the nearest ones circling—all the rest is empty space.  Nothing.
We are holes more than anything.
And I have my questions.
--Mitchell Hegman

2 comments:

  1. I agree that everything, including us, are mostly holes. And maybe because of our tendency to wonder, question, and search for answers, we tend to fill those holes with something purely of our own making we call Reality. If it hasn’t done it yet, science will one day confirm that a lot of things we bother and are anxious about are mere illusions that we have created – just so we have answers to our questions, no matter how ephemeral those answers may be.

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  2. You know me...I am all about the science!

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