You Don't Matter

I love these comments from Stanley Plumy in The Writers Chronicle (subscription) on the relative insignificance of the human. It's always a tonic to be reminded of my puniness and ordinariness, such as this morning as I railed against the heavens because the internet was spotty. Perspective, indeed. 

"All you have to do is look up at the sky—at the great dimensions of the sails of the clouds or the clarity of Venus in a clear night sky or the dusty Milky Way from the perspective of the sea," Plumly said to Jacqueline Kolosov. "The immensity beyond our withering comprehension is more than humbling, it is humiliating that we should take ourselves so seriously";

yet there we are, serious beings, looking up through the branching of the trees at what we like to call the Tree of Life. I do this looking every day, each night, and it makes me happy that I am nothing but words on a page that is made of the same material as leaves. Words, Yeats says, are wasted breath. Wonderful! 

...

Archetypes, like metaphors, come from within; they are not made up. They are simply expressions of examples from our everyday lives. They embody and give meaning to our shared experience, and save us from irrelevance. We all, in one way or another, therefore, live in the past in that our lives repeat what has already happened. The little uniqueness that we are is overwhelmed by the ways in which we are and do again what was and was done.