From where I sit at my desk, looking out the window at the stormy sky and agitated trees, I note a small vase sitting on my window sill. I put it there a while ago- it holds a mess of dried lavender that was freshly cut last summer. But it isn't the lavender or the vase that I'm really interested in, it is the extravagantly tall and monstrous evergreen tree which stands a little ways outside my window. Or rather, the fact that I can't see the extravagantly tall and monstrous evergreen tree, because it is hidden directly behind the small vase with slender stems. Perspective. There is a certain ironic humor found in this example of perspective: the giant eclipsed by a dwarf, the powerful distorted by the delicate. Sitting here observing that rather pathetic analogy, I notice the complex mathematics of the relative mystery of relativity, the physics of space and time and matter which produces that tree cloaked from my view. And yet in the end, all the confusing physics of placement, perspective and of relation just mean: where I'm sitting. If I move, tilt my head, the vase is small again and the tree, towering. Approach the subject from a different angle and a different story or reality is produced. In the end it's akin to, "No, wait. Stand a little further to your right for the picture. Yes, good! When you were standing over there it looked like you had horns growing out of your head!"
I guess I was just musing at how often we distort things because of our perspective, because of how or where we happen, or choose, to be sitting. I wonder at how much we consider, label or believe reprehensibly, because of the slightly skewed angle or tilt of our head, leaving our frame of reference misrepresented. Obviously, "slightly" has enough power to interpret a reality of three-inch tall trees and forty-foot glass vases! Sometimes I wonder if I continually realize how much depends on an honestly clear worldview. For everything depends on it, undeniably.
. . .
