All In Your Hands

                                        You've Got The Whole Earth---
                                            In Your Hands!

I know that camp fire song all too good and well--"He's got the whole earth in his hands."  I was quite, however, by Henry David Thoreau's book, The Maine Woods, in which he is quite insightful.  Any particular part of that woods, for him, held up the universal earth.  

 “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.”

I wonder what inspired Thoreau's insight.  From reading the book, I came away with his power of attention to detail and concentration to hold up that image before him.  He might say that at any minute, our attention to the particular, concentrating on details, opens the door to the universal.   I believe that William Blake opened that door when he wrote Auguries of Innocence:  

 

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour." 

The question for us is this.  Will we ever take a walk in the woods again and be the same? 

It is in your hands!