Summer afternoon

After a light lunch of sautéed zucchini and breaded chicken, I find myself sipping tea under the porch of the forest cottage where Goda and I love to spend as much as we can of our summer. A dragonfly lands on the tip of my big toe, and my thoughts begin to wander.

I admire the beauty of the insect’s body, striped black and electric blue. I then think, in awe, at the complexity and fragility of the atomic structures that make it up, and that allow it to flutter around the garden in search of prey.

I lift my gaze to the tranquil pond, to the horse chestnut marking the garden’s boundary, to the field beyond, and to the forest edge in the background. I start thinking about the universe and quantum physics. For some reason, when I’m here, I always end up thinking about physics. Not that I understand anything about it, but I think about it all the same. I suppose it’s my personal version of religious contemplation.

The colors of this little clearing are illuminated by the incomprehensible number of photons radiating every second from that sphere of hot air 150 million kilometers away. A continuous flow of energy, which the Earth’s ecosystem then transforms into grass, flowers, trees, and dragonflies.

From our point of view, these are common, mundane things. But if we think of them in the context of the universe, where stars number in the thousands of trillions of trillions, even blades of grass are limited-edition objects.

I imagine the view from the ISS: the Earth’s surface bathed in light, cosmic blackness all around, and a small blinding disk in the distance.

My clearing is invisible from that height, but you can spot a white vortex being pushed by the Atlantic winds over the Baltic hinterland. From my perspective, they are dark clouds on the horizon. A summer storm is brewing. Probably one of the last ones. I’d better take shelter.