what surrounds you

Last night when the rain was over I went outside to take the garbage out. Suddenly the sidewalk seemed wider, the street longer and I seemed a few inches smaller. I felt strange, a little dreamy, and I remembered how much I like the moments after a heavy rain has lifted. Today on the crowded subway as it crawled to a halt a few meters from the Bedford stop, I tried to make the subway car wider, a little bit longer and myself a few inches smaller. It didn't work. I started thinking about the first road trip I went on almost a year after moving to New York. The cars and houses in the distance on the way to Vermont looked like tiny little toys. I could not fathom they were as real and full sized as the cars I dodged back in the city. I thought of the true anthropological tale of the discovery of an isolated tribe living in the Amazon. Never before had they left the dense rain forest. A brave member of the Yanomamo people agreed to leave with those that discovered them and saw the horizon and expanse of the plain for the first time. He sees a shape off in the distance and asks "What do you call that bug?" They try to explain that it is not a bug but a buffalo twice as big as a man. The Yanomamo man pinches his fingers and measures the shape before his eyes refusing to believe what appears to be an inch big could be anything other than what he saw. He had never developed a sense of depth perception because he had no need in his natural environment. I think about us in the city. Have we stopped being able to see and comprehend distance? Do we only react to what's in our face? Maybe that's why I love the moon. It's one of the few chances I have to look far off into the distance and finally feel small.