Earth sign

I'm very bound to the earth. Earth sign and it shows. Yesterday there was a moment in my day when I was suddenly struck by the brilliance of the people around me. That happens to me a lot, I just think about people, friends, family and am just floored by what amazing creatures people are. That either sounds unbelievably soppy or just plain Nietzchean.

It's a question of people's being,their existence defined by their personality and acts causing a sort of non-physical gravity. Think of the way we were taught to visualise gravity, a sort of rubber sheet that is pulled downwards by the presence of a physical object. Massive things cause spacetime to bend, and massive means anything that has mass. Other less massive things are pulled towards it when they are already close enough to be in the area where the rubber sheet starts to dip inwards towards the bigger object.

Imagine that humans, with their consciousness and ability to change things - so call that their human existence - had a gravity that affected another psychic rubber field around them. By psychic here I mean of the psyche.

There are people to whom we are bonded by love and whatever the friendship emotion is, I guess it's a form of love. We say, 'I love you,' to our friends and they know what we mean. We can't imagine the world continuing to exist if they were suddenly gone from it. And the feelings we have for those people are so strong, we think that it's not just some response within us, but it must affect the world itself. Psychic gravity.

Then there are other people, ones we know and whose company we enjoy, but to whom we aren't so bonded, but we recognise something awe-inspiring in them. Immense courage, determination, intellectual ability, creativity. Surely, surely the world must be diminished when that is lost. Just as the end of a physical object causes a hole in the rubber sheet of gravity, the loss of a human consciousness can't be without consequence.

There are people I know whom I value for their interaction with others. They make other people feel alive, or challenge them or just affect them, ground them. Imagine the psychic gravity loss when someone like that has lived their life.

Others, sometimes younger people, sometimes older, I look at and I can see the potential brewing, like looking into a seething pool and seeing colours, textures, sparkly bits and just knowing, knowing absolutely that there is so much to develop.

Individual skills. When I watch people engaged in a task, doing whatever it is they do, I just think,
'My god, how incredible, what must it be like to have a mind or a skill like that? To see so clearly or to be able to understand the incomprehensible or just to create something that is so wonderful.'

I can think of people from all of those categories who have gone from my life, from life itself, and over and above the loss I think that I have been enriched by knowing those people.

Yesterday evening, in that moment, I imagined how crazy it would be if any of those intellects were snuffed out. That ability to apply information, solve problems like a computer, but in a human head that is also capable of great creativity. So crazy that I almost can't believe it could happen.

How bound we all are to this earth. Perhaps.