Infinitely Vast, Infinitely Small (Diaz)


"The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky."


What I'm loving about Dogen, so far, is the beauty he seems to be pointing to in human life. It is so easy to feel insignificant when thinking about how I relate to the universe at large. When I consider the vastness of just our own galaxy I feel utterly minuscule. It is hard to imagine being able to feel any more useless, that is until I browse the NASA website and consider how many other galaxies exist beyond our own. What could my life possibly be in the scope of that incomprehensible magnitude? A blip. A blip of a blip. Less than that, even.

And yet, Dogen says the dewdrop, that is my life, reflects and contains that very vastness. How that changes my perspective! I contain the height of the moon. In a world that often tells us we are worthless, undeserving, unmeasured it is easy to walk around with my head low and believing I have nothing of value to contribute. While I do contain the infinitely small, Dogen reminds me that I also reflect the infinitely vast. 

This fact is an incredibly humbling balance to strike. It inspires gratitude, a willingness to be wrong, and a place to plant my feet knowing that the greatness of the universe can also be found in me. I think it must only work when those two ideas are mindfully balanced.

Without balance, either I think I am too grand and am unable to be challenged or too small I don't bother interacting with the world around me. But with the proper balanced perspective, I can walk through life holding loosely to things and people and experiences knowing that change is inevitable and I have no need to try and exert control over things that are actually very small in the scope of the universe. I can also walk that same life with a loving awareness that my life matters and is capable of reflecting beauty, honor, and light to everything and everyone I come into contact with. 

The other inspiring piece of this is that my tiny dewdrop of a life already contains everything in its very makeup to do the reflecting. I don't have to view myself as deficient and work my whole life to measure up to some impossible standard. I have only to realize my smallness is still vastly reflective of insurmountable greatness. Ah, if only every child could believe this about themselves as they walk through life!

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshApril 16, 2021 at 9:47 PM

    A profound insight, Ms. Diaz, yet so simple. Really we don't have any perspective on the whole whereby we can judge our own scale or significance, and since we can't judge where we fit into the whole and our size in it, we can't rely on any external frame of significance. What we do know when we take the trouble to look is that no matter how small something seems to be it is bottomless!

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  2. kjhApril 18, 2021 at 1:26 PM

    Yes! I think you're articulating this so beautifully... that we can look inward and see that we contain the universe within (Whitman's "I contain multitudes," our variousness of self [or selves], the intricacies of our body's functioning that elude our knowledge) or we can look out upon the universe and see ourselves reflected back. I think you're spot on by characterizing this with the language of "humility." Rather than make me feel insignificant (and lead me towards nihilism), the experience of standing in an old-growth forest or gazing at the sky makes me feel both incredibly small but also a part of something--it doesn't isolate me. It makes me feel tethered to the world.

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