“Imagine if we are in a music jewelry box, all of us, this whole world, and there is like a giant girl, and she is up above and when she opens up the box and the music comes on and she looks down  into her jewelry box, we are so small we are just in the giant girl’s box.” …Said the littlest love of our family yesterday afternoon, a blonde ringlet-haired, wickedly witty and hilariously funny, and genuinely charming child who just turned five at the end of October.  She expressed this thought, out of the blue, as she says most of her deeply profound statements, starting with “imagine if.”  She has used this expression since she began speaking in full sentences and much like her sister and her mother, had a pretty mature vocabulary before starting pre-school, but today’s writing is not about her use of the word “similar” at two, or how she noted that she was “using sarcasm” before she was much past three, no, today I am in awe of her thoughts on how small we are and our place in the universe, because it is remarkably similar to mine when I was a child too…

When I was four years old, shortly before I started kindergarten, and shortly after we moved into our new house that my Dad built, working every night after work I might add, in what was then a small idyllic neighborhood called Deer Lake Park, I fell off my bike alongside the acre or more of grassy  field that was behind our house along side Oxycocus Road.  I fell face first into a pile of sand where the field met the edge of the asphalt  and found I was right on top of a massive ant colony.  I watched those ants for what seemed like hours, but perhaps was only minutes, and I had a “vision” if you will, that has stuck with me my entire life; that there was a little girl, bigger than anything I could imagine and she had a snow globe and I was in it, and that she was looking down at me,  inside her snow globe, as I was looking down at the ants…that I was just a teeny tiny part of the universe and in my reality I was just as small to this “girl” as the ants were to me…it was a BIG thought for such a small child, and I never told anybody what I imagined I WAS, or how small I believed I WAS, but it simply became as I grew up, an integral part of my framework for thinking about the world and the universe, and my place in it.

I know to read this, it might sound silly, but it is still to this day kind of how I think…I like to imagine how small and insignificant I am in the big scheme of how big the universe might be, and I loved that the littlest wee-one, just out of the blue, shared her thoughts with me yesterday afternoon, and her words indicated to me that she perhaps thinks as I did, and do.  I imagine she and I are not alone in our recognition of how very small we might be…