There I Was... - a photo on Flickriver

There I Was...

Flying through space on a spinning rock...

whipping around the sphere of fire that gripped the whole ball from ninety three million miles away...

cruising around that fireball at sixty seven thousand sixty two miles an hour...

and spinning in circles around the planet's axis at another thousand miles an hour yet.

On the edge of land and sea I sat and watched with awe the spectacle that is the carnival ride that we're all on together...

Hurtling through this vacuum in circles just fast enough to keep from falling into that ball of fire that holds us tenaciously in it's grip.

The water moves with it all... sloshing and slapping at the shore... making fountains of it's energy when forced against the solid rock on which I sat to ponder.

It all seems so alive.

Everything is moving as if it had some purpose.

Some destiny more so than to simply and elegantly uphold Newton's First Law.

And so a thousand miles an hour is deducted from my velocity for I sit on the side of the Earth that spins at that moment away from the sun... my speed is reduced to sixty six thousand miles an hour and change and I didn't even feel the thousand mile per hour deceleration.

And then of course the Sun itself and all of the planets of our solar system with it are spinning around the black hole that is the center of our galaxy at another four hundred and eighty three thousand miles per hour...

And all the while the whole shebang... including that massive black hole moves even faster still towards the constellations of Leo and Virgo at 1.3 million miles per hour!

No one really knows why we're cookin' so fast in that direction but people who know this stuff think that there is something there called 'The Great Attractor.'

If you add it all up and figure for the instances when your revolutionary speeds are lined up with the major course of our screaming velocity towards the 'Great Attractor'... get ready for something only Viewminder's gonna tell you...

at times... you are moving at 1,851,062 miles per hour... one million eight hundred and fifty one thousand and sixty two miles per freakin' hour!

That's 30,851 miles per minute.

You're flying through the universe at 514 miles PER SECOND!

Every day you travel more than forty four million miles!

44,000,000 miles!

I didn't sit down on the rocky shore to think of this shit.

If I could have convinced my shrink to hook me up with a prescription for some medical marijuana maybe I could have just sat there and enjoyed the ride.

I was just enchanted by the sound of the waves pounding against the rocks.

Their endless crashing and splashing seemed to me to be driven by some vast and powerful force of energy.

I sat there intrigued by all of this and though I could not tell you with an ounce of certainty my place within it all...

I can tell you that I FELT it.

I felt the motion of everything and if I knew one thing it was that we are flyin' through a vast universe at a wicked high rate of speed in a complex range of motion that can be explained with a handful of physics on the back of a cocktail napkin.

You and me are freakin' flyin' through space towards something.

Really fast.

What a wonderful and mysterious existence this is.

A profound complexity and an infinitely improbable thing to be sitting on that rock in the middle of it all thinking about where it's all headed.

Sometimes maybe you and I don't know just where we belong.

But you get out there for a little while and surf the universe and you'll know one thing for sure.

You belong.

You are a part of it all.

I Close My Eyes

Some rights reserved

Taken in: United States / Michigan (show map)

Taken on: August 11, 2012

Tags:

We're all on the same journey

Viewminder

kindness

love

happiness

joy

understanding

pondering

the meaning

of everything

and nothing

at the same time

this show is movin' down the road really fast

and you and me are both hangin' on to the same rock flyin' through space

it's all a freakin' miracle

simple complexity

naked soul « less

Groups appears in: • FlickrCentral • Artistic Photography more » • Beautiful Light • Flickr Addicts • A Picture of Life • FlickrToday (only 1 pic per day) • Every picture tells a story • *Karma* • Beautiful Capture • Available Light / Existing Light • flickr in full color [No Black & White !] • ***SCREAM OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER*** • flickr (unofficial) « less

Camera: Nikon D700, f/16.0, 1/1000 sec, 35mm, ISO 200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D700
Aperture:	f/16.0
Exposure Time:	0.001 sec (1/1000)
Focal Length:	35mm
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	-2/3 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Embettered by PicMonkey. http://www.picmonkey.com
Show full info

Stats: 50,570 views / 20 comments

go back

Link to this photo view:
Link to this photo large view: