Betwixt the Diver and the Astronaut

I figured as long as I am doubling up on my daily tasks this week, I might as well double up on my posts as well. It's not like I have a job on which to attend instead.

Day 20 is a Poetry Day, and the prescribed task is to compose a line in iambic pentameter and submit it to Benrik, the authors, on their website, to enter into a collective of metered lines, in the hopes of creating a mass poem. The first line of the poem is, "Mercy, cried the popinjay to the pope." My line is the title of this blog, and it was composed using Day 26 (yesterday) as its muse; Day 26 reads, "Today choose what you'd prefer to be reincarnated as," and then provides a page of silhouettes for one to circle. There are animals, mud-flap type trucker girls, inanimate objects, etc. The silhouette that stood out for me was the astronaut.

Think about astronauts, and the fact that maybe 2% (I made that percentage up, but it's still low) actually get a chance to see outer space. The ones that do have an entirely different perspective on our world. Most of us only get to see one plane of this planet.

Then there are divers. The divers that plunge down, or crawl into the planet, and look back up see Earth from another entirely different perspective. They get to see the world from the inside out, while the astronauts are looking from the outside in. The astronauts that also dive get to see it all, I guess.

There are astronauts, and astronomers, and architects, and ornithologists, who all spend their lives looking up, and then there are geologists, and grave diggers, and deep sea marine biologists, and vulcanologists who spend their lives looking down. It made me think about how I see the world. As a writer, I think my perceptions of the world derive from introspection and extrospection, and the continual interplay of these two; it's like breathing, only I breathe out in words.

Without pondering too deeply the nature of reality, ask yourself: How do I see the world?

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How do you see it?