backtracking a bit- apotheosis

Apotheosis elucidates an important truth within a hero. The journey invokes introspection and reflection, finally enabling the hero to suddenly see what is truly important. The hero often discovers what his life and actions truly mean in terms of happiness and fulfillment. It is with this knowledge that the hero confidently sets out on the last leg of his journey.

One of my favorite moments of apotheosis in my life occurred late one night several years ago while vacationing in Ocean City, Md. I went for an extremely late night walk on the beach well after all the usual night time beach love-makers had packed up and left. I sat down just before the reach of incoming waves and pondered the wonders of life while staring at the horizon. I watched as new constellations appeared to rise up out of the Atlantic’s depths and into the night sky. I could hear and see and even feel the power of the ocean with each thundering crash of the never-ending waves. It was daunting to think of all the power possessed by such an intense force of nature. I pictured myself from a third person perspective, sitting at the water’s edge and considered how absurdly tiny I was in size and power compared to the thousands of square miles of fierce ocean before me. It struck me that our world- what we see and deal with each day is so minute; we control so little compared to nature. We seem to mean nearly nothing compared to the world and planets and galaxies and space that stretches on well beyond anything our imagination could possibly fathom. And yet as a population, the human race affects absolutely everything it touches or even nears. We see and hear of damage we’ve done to the earth on a daily basis. We find that our little industrial revolution some time ago probably caused irreparable damage to our atmosphere, many of our waterways, and so much more.

Walt Whitman’s poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” seems to reflect this theme. He speaks of his own disconnected desolate soul and contrasts it with the spider’s web and connection to everything. “Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space” echoes the feeling of miniscule size I began to feel compared to the size of the tremendous bodies of matter that surround us, on and on, forever. Whitman goes on to discuss the spider’s webbed attachment to everything. Weather we can see it and realize it or not, despite our size as individuals, as a population we are webbed together affecting everything across this planet and even beyond.

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