The small things that make the long hiking days bearable and give some moment to breathe and settle my mind into the environment are a bit overlooked. The big spaciousness and broad images of hill tops, lochs and glens take most of the space in my phone. Big things are magnetic, exhilarating, and exciting. They make me want to run and scream some days, others it makes me feel small and irrelevant in the magnanimous time these things exist. Their time, a concept, we can only imagine and conceptualise but have no practical understanding of their lives beyond what they mean to us. The ancient hills, eroded through glaciations, the lochs and rivers empty or full across many centuries, changing but (so far!) always existing.
The small things may not be there the next time I walk that path. They might go unnoticed in the totality of their existence, unseen from being to end. Some streams will only run once and then, like nothing ever wet that crevasse, plants, and moss will grow and its existence short but productive, leaving moist in the soil to need life to exist. Most of us are like that, will cease to exist without many traces and will become soil. Other’s their memories or their deeds will live further, but eventually, too, fade away and be forgotten.
You know that moment when the two hobbits are leaving behind the rest of the fellowship, stressed , anxious and filled with dread, something tiny and yet wield the strength of hope and foretelling happens. The light of the sun shines through the trees and hits on the decapitated stone heads of the statues of kings of old time. Frodo notice and calls on Sam to look at them and for that second they hope and strength is restore.
The small things can make big things happen. You know that moment, when the two hobbits are leaving behind the rest of the fellowship, stressed, anxious and filled with dread, something tiny and yet wield the strength of hope and foretelling happens. The light of the sun shines through the trees and hits on the decapitated stone heads of the statues of kings of old time. Frodo notice and calls on Sam to look at them, and for that second they hope and strength is restored.
By now, the small things become big things, their impermanence an act of rebellion and surrender against the fleeting of their existence, like saying out loud…” I am here, right now, and I shine”. Maybe not tomorrow, may be, never again… but now. They take up space, they create memory, they change the mood. They change time. The time they exist is to us what we are to the ice eroded hills, a nothingness. Yet, just like us, can change everything. For good or bad, in the eye of time. (I hope you can sense in this my environmental claim).
