I was walking along a tile ditch in the dark, hoping to find the hand level I had left behind me.  I’m always going back for what I’ve left behind.  While I’m gone, the world goes on without me.  This is the principal difference between myself and it.

In the distance the windmill lights twenty miles south blinked in unison.  Although I knew these lights were perched upon their tall towers, they looked to sit on top of the horizon, as though I could simply cover the miles and touch them.  I have tried that many times, only to find them beyond all reach.

Curvature of the earth, I thought.

Finding the level, I headed back with the tool that was supposed to trump my own perception and keep me on grade, an instrument of reason, I guess.  Had a boy held it he might have thought with that little three foot level he could plot a straight course through the world we are in.

It was no longer a boy that held it, though.  I was old enough to understand the same gravity that kept the bubble centered was also the same force that would bend it around the world, bringing me back to where I started if I could fly high enough over the valleys, dig deep enough through the mountains, and find a way to sail its immense seas.

There are some convinced that the pursuit of their own particular truth is taking them in the same straight line the boy once dreamed of.  I think the world is a big place.  It’s big enough for it all to be true, and sooner or later our own particular ones get bent by that.

Our reason leads us back to the same place our heart does:  our beginning.  The only differences are circumference and time.