Impossibilities Lost

"Practice only impossibilities."
--John Lily

Impossibilities. How could you practice such things? They must be closely related to imagination. They are those things, those wonders, that lie outside the borders of what we know and understand.

There seems to be fewer of them--those things that are in the category of impossibilities--as we humans become more and more civilized and inoculated against wonder of any sort. Human beings have seem to have grown up, so to speak. We have went from living around a fire burning at the mouth of a cave surrounded by mysteries of the surrounding terrain, to what living is now. The noises, sights, and textures of being alive have become predictable and have been explained to us by wise and foolish men. Jean de La Fontaine summed up how mysteries are vanquished from the human experience when he explained that "Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish. We sail oceans, travel at the speed of sound, dive in the deepest ocean, and travel across the vacuum of space. All things that would have seemed miraculous acts to the ancients. Especially those that sat around the ancient fires. Even fire to them of the past was an impossibility made possible. Trying to understand all this is what makes my weak soul stronger somehow.

But there remains many, many tiny fragments of wonder--and I would put forth impossibilities--that when you look closely at this world that we exist in, you can still find them. I was cleaning out a birdhouse and I came across what I thought was a bumble bee and upon closer examination I discovered it was a moth. It seems impossible to understand the evolutionary marvels of nature. Creation is a delightfully wondrous place. I am trying very hard to hold back trying to explain to myself everything and just to delight in it.

Below is the hummingbird moth. My lovely bride captured it magnificently on her phone's camera.