The Gravity of the Scene

I was rummaging around in the flower pots, my head down and my sleeves catching on the twigs and thorns on the rose bushes.  I had to squat down to reach a recalcitrant weed and it seemed gravity was working overtime when I had to stand again, but I made it.  I stood there surveying my work and heard the electronic-sounding squeaks of hummingbirds nearby.  They jetted from perch to perch, one elongated thorn with wings and a ferocious demeanor.  They are like miniature Inigo Montoyas from The Princess Bride, wrapped in iridescent feathers, challenging each other, all at 200 mph.  "I am one ounce of feathers, you took my perch, prepare to die!"

Other birds, twittering on nearby perches, looked awkward and slow in comparison to the hummers.  A female titmouse, rumpled and molty, held still as the tiny aggressors darted back and forth near her.

I went back to work weeding, pruning and then dragging the hose around to water plants and finally sweeping up.  It was steady methodical work.  Overhead, the sun was playing coyly with the pashmina-like fog wisps. They tumbled together in a very slow silent ballet.

Done with my work, I faced north from the front of the house and looked out across Monterey Bay.  The water's surface was scuffed by the onshore breeze from northwest to southeast and set the whole bay moving.   Beyond the bay, past the shreddy scarves' edges, layers of storm clouds were piling up against the hills of Watsonville and Corralitos.  All the sky, the ocean, birds, everything moved elegantly and inexorably, and I stood stock still in the middle of it all like a peg in a board, my feet rooted to the ground.

All the moving parts looked like a child's spinning lampshade painted with a diorama, but in truth I was standing on this big blue ball moving at a thousand miles an hour, the one we call Earth.  Time flattened out and space became visible.  I had a sense of the relative positions of the planets and moon and sun, and the earth revolving very rapidly, all of them locked in a dance through eternity, a rotating frenzy of molecules, matter and mass.  I, the very puny human, stood agape at it all.

Hummingbirds zapped past my head at light speed, and I imagined myself one of them, but all that sound and motion made me feel the pull of gravity under my shoes more than ever.  My legs felt stretched and my arms lifted away from my sides a bit as if weightless.  I sensed that without the glue of gravity under my feet, I'd be tumbling away into intergalactic space like a rag doll.

I looked down at my shoes, scuffed and muddy, very much on the ground.  I felt like Dorothy with her ruby slippers:   "There's no glue like gravity, there's no glue like gravity..."  A little bit of vertigo goes a long way.  I'd had a quick glimpse at the machinations of nature relative to my own position on terra firma. That's all it was, but those forces are immense, formidable and really magnificent.