We went for a bike ride today, it was in some ways a lovely bike ride, we cruised along a little stream, through a lovely park, stopped for a snack, then again for some ice cream, then…I had to walk the bike home because my chain broke.
It was weird, just poking along when I heard a ‘bang!’ and then my feet were turning the pedals but I could feel there was no connection to movement and since I was going uphill at the time, that was an immediate stop.
But there was one moment I wanted to write about and that was before the chain broke, we were stopped in the park. Had a ham and cheese sandwich, a small tomato, and a cup of tea, then walked over to the little brook. I began to think of it as a river, which is what it would look like to little people, like, you know, hobbits or leprechauns and whatever, and I guess part of the reason that whole meme (old meaning of the word) is so prevalent in human folklore: because there are streams, and children like to play beside streams. They are like practice rivers.
And that led me to think of scale; the streams are dwarfed by the rivers, and the world of the stream suddenly becomes insignificant, and then the river is dwarfed by the ocean and the ocean by they sky, and on beyond our atmosphere, making the sky itself seem small, a billion billion points of light are shining out of an endless sea and we are all very insignificant little beings indeed.
So maybe that’s why there are so many ‘little people’ stories. We are little people.
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