Nature of the Smaller Things

Thimble Day, January, 2009. Peter Pan was working in my dining cozy and I was reading Harry Potter for the second time, with my legs propped on his knees. It was a comfortable sort of day. For me, one of the first in a long time where I had nothing to do except read and relax and take long naps. For him, a day full of music for two different bands.

It was the perfect, sweet, slow kind of day for his thoughtful Thimble Day gifts. The first two were small pots, seeds and instructions for growing lavender and strawberries. Tiny, tiny seeds that, when given the right amount of shine and mist, become something bigger. Demonstrations of the Great Flavor of Small Things, he mentioned.

And the second part to that gift was something even smaller: something mysterious and perfect in its smallness and its essentiality. It was a picture of the smallest particles known to exist. An opening to a world of questions and curiosities: the knowledge that space can be flat or curved, that something can come from “nothing” (nothing being unseen or undiscovered and perhaps being actually something), that things that are “unseen” aren’t actually uncommon.

I don’t understand most of it. Indeed, those who study something so immense in its smallness must only feel smaller and smaller themselves, amassing ignorance alongside knowledge.

The part that I do understand–or perhaps, more than understand, simply love–is the language behind it all. Elementary particles, luminous matter, Charm Quark, Beam, fundamental particle, spin and the uncertainty principle. The world of these smallest of things also uses the word Flavor. Which, in this case, is a degree that distinguishes different quark/lepton types. (Learn more).

How baffling that we are so small and yet so large. So small in the face of the physical universe, yet so many billions of times larger than the smallest things. And, more entirely amazing, how even the smallest of the small things matter. Thus, no matter how small we are, still we must matter as well. A particle makes up another particle makes up a speck of dust. A speck of dust is inhaled and causes an allergic reaction, an allergic reaction affects a body and throws it off balance. That body steps back and crushes a flower, which affects a bee, which doesn’t feed a bird…and so forth. Everything being connected, even by the smallest of things. A thought process hand-in-hand with chaos theory: a butterfly wing in Asia could change your life.

Thank you, Peter Pan, for paying attention to what captures me, for inspiration that allows a deep, dormant curiosity to brim at my surface and for being beautifully thoughtful.

Love,

Your Gigi