A Grain of Sand

What you see below, is an image of a supercluster of galaxies, of which we are a part. It is called Laniakea, which means 'immense heaven' in Hawaiin, from lani 'heaven', and ākea 'spacious, immeasurable'. The blue dot you see in the circled part, is our milky way galaxy.

Image credit : apod.nasa.gov

What you see below is an image of our planet, taken from a spacecraft which was beyond neptune. You can see our earth is but a pixel on a big screen - the pale blue dot.

Carl Sagan says in his famous speech :

"Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Image credit: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/resources/list_images/536_PIA23645_PaleBlueDotRevisited_320.jpg

And on this earth, which contains billion of species, of which we human are but one, and of the billions of humans who inhabit the earth at this moment in time, each of us is but one. Many beings have inhabited and will inhabit the earth. And yet, we have such a sense of importance and significance and we carry our small issues like burdens of great measure. The reality is we are not even the speck of a grain of sand on a beach.

William Blake said, "we can see a world in a grain of sand." Our little worlds!

We can make this little world of ours extremely beautiful, if we can realise the insignificance of everything we fret about, and worry about, and whine about. We can live in liberation, celebrating each moment we live alive, on this pale blue vulnerable dot, suspended in the middle of beam of sunlight, the sun which is one of the many in our galaxy and the galaxy which is but a speck in our supercluster of galaxies, which is again but an insignificant dot in all the superclusters of the known universe.