Two Nights Outside the City

I. The jungle drive There is something about a jungle that a forest, on paper, cannot claim. Green as far as you could see in any direction, and no lights — yet somehow you could still see. Darkness has levels, and this was the visible level, which made it so much more remarkable. The stars in a city sky tend to disappoint you with how little light they give out, but in the middle of a forest, their collective power on a clear night earns a slow clap all on its own.

For all I have read and learned, we are infinitesimally small and irrelevant in this universe, and a clear night sky in a forest is the rare experience that makes you register that fact rather than just recite it. I spent most of that drive with my face out of the window like a happy, slightly stupid dog — trying to feel the wind, watching the stars upside down, mouth open to taste the air, eyes wide to take mental photographs, ready to flinch if anything moved in the thick green on either side. One owes their existence to the collective intelligence of the species that made this evolution possible, and as a small part of that inheritance, there is a responsibility to add value back to it — at whatever scale, size, timeframe, or direction you happen to be capable of.

II. Scuba, the night before Whichever way I looked, it was blue — or green, or something in between — and 'barren' is the word your civilised mind reaches for first, when the truth is the opposite: bubbling with life, and we hardly know what's actually down there, at depths no human being and no machine we've built has ever survived long enough to properly report back from. We reach for great heights while struggling to fall to depths that are, in truth, still finite, and there's an arrogance in that we rarely notice.

The corals, the fish, the bed, the algae, the blurry light, the sunbeams, the air bubbles, the sound of my own breathing, the water in my eyes, the pressure building in my ears — every second down there felt like an education, and I felt, in the truest sense, like a child again, introduced to an entirely new world. People dream about the possibility of life on another planet. I think I was given a glimpse of what that would actually feel like. Put simply: the world under the open sky is a small fraction of the world under water. I know how that sounds. I mean it exactly that way.