The other day I saw a hummingbird resting on a powerline near my house. The scale of bird to wire was unmistakable; I could see his tiny silhouette and, even in repose, his head was darting around as he watched for predators. This fellow does not consider himself to be small.

Most days I don’t consider myself to be small either. I can’t flutter my wings and hover over my dinner plate, and neither do I move so fast that I make a buzzing sound, but I can stand up straight and walk tall. And as for those things in heaven and earth that utterly dwarf me, I try not to ruminate on them overmuch. Douglas Adams cautions us against being sucked into the Total Perspective Vortex, in which we take a metaphorical look into space and become clinically depressed due to the realization of our own spectacular puniness.*

But I digress.

Poor little waif, that hummingbird had no idea what he was dealing with. Had he been larger he would have been in danger of touching a wing to another line, thus precipitating the end of his own line. That powerline stretched out on either side of him like a superhighway, disappearing over his little horizon in either direction.

What cosmic superhighway am I standing on? I think sometimes of those fraternal twins, Voyager I and Voyager II, space probes released by NASA in the 1970’s. It took two years for them to swing by Jupiter, another two to see Saturn, and it will take 40,000 more years for one of both to slide by the nearest star. This, when they are going so fast you couldn’t see them even if you knew where they were at any nanosecond in time.

OK, hummingbird, little flying jewel that you are**. Keep your head on a swivel and continue your journey. The road to the stars is long, but the nectar you can find on the way is delicious, and you are strong and fast. And anyway, what else do you have to do?

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For your further edification:

*See The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by the aforementioned Douglas Adams. Your education is not complete without it.

**The early Spanish explorers to the Americas dubbed them “joyas voladoras.”