“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of her plain.” – Henry David Thoreau
Nature is more than grand vistas, vast seas, towering mountain ranges, and cascading waterfalls, although I love them all. It is also a solitary beech tree, a white-tailed deer bounding through the woods, spring wildflowers emerging after a winter of dormancy, a butterfly fluttering from flower to flower, an ant colony marching to and fro, a chickadee flitting about in the understory, and a small, ephemeral stream playing its soft spring music in the woods.
Before they became grand and majestic, the sweeping vistas, mountains, seas, and waterfalls started out as atoms and molecules. So one tiny thing, invisible to the human eye, combines with another and is able to do amazing things.
So nature is made up of small things, not just the grand and majestic. Knowing an ant’s place and purpose in the web of life is no less important than understanding the tectonic forces that created the Rocky Mountains. Without the small, there would be no large.
“I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” – Walt Whitman
