Why does this picture make me cry? This is a grand moment for our astronauts. Any launch into space is a grand moment. We are these little creatures with all this intelligence, daring to go out and meet the cosmos. We want to study it, make sense of it, put it into our hands, dissect it and understand the rules of why it does what it does. We want to predict within milliseconds how nature will act or react. We’ve gotten pretty good at this stuff, and yet, we’re still these little, tiny creatures who don’t even know the complexities of our own minds. We don’t want to solve the problems of how to relate to one another, how to feed those who don’t have food. We want to go after the big questions and find solutions and pin answers to a wall with a red thumbtack and nail it down. Finality. There. Solved it. Solved the riddle of all time. What’s next?

And in our vibrato, we miss how tiny we are. We are specks. When we are sane, we are wide-eyed in wonder at the glory of the sun rising every morning, turning mountains pink, every blade of grass balancing an overflowing drop of dew. When we are sane, we look at scientists blasting into space, and we are humbled by the roar of the engines, the smoke of our man made volcano spewing sulfur and heat and sending people into space with the quake of it.

When we are sane, we respect the big and the small, the loud and the still, what man has made with his brilliance, and what the ant carries on his back.

We are the sum of it all. When we are sane.

Photo from here.

This was written as part of a Surprise Prompt at Write on Edge.