Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea…

– Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I had a hard time thinking of a photograph to take for this Photo Friday challenge (which I never end up posting on Fridays). The theme was “insignificant.”

The obvious thing was to find something small. A grain of sand. A single ant. Yet a single ant, finding food, can call its army. It is not insignificant. A grain of sand helps to make up a beach, which would be lesser without it. A grain used to be a rock. It is ancient and important.

I thought about photographing something utterly meaningless to me–high fashion, for example; shops where a pair of sandals costs $500. But that is significant to someone. Everything is significant to someone, or plays a significant role in the jigsaw puzzle of life.
Don and I had a burger-picnic beneath the shading branches of a lovely old tree yesterday. I sat there and ate, watching the world go by. Expensive cars, cheap cars. Joggers, people walking home from work, someone returning with his own lunch. People, going about their daily whatevers, all part of the great wheel of life.

And I thought about the planet, and that quote from a long-ago read sprang to mind. In the vastness of the cosmos, Earth is just one tiny little insignificant spot.

And in a hundred years, none of what plagues us now will matter.

So I took pictures of life, and this is the one I chose. Life from our “insignificant little planet.”

Even though it isn’t.