a hippy's thoughts on the occurance of nightfall

I actually wrote this several weeks ago, and felt like posting it after rereading it. Please ignore my blatant disregard of apostrophes. I'm too lazy to add them back in.

Amid all the things we like to call our lives, sometimes you just need to take off your shoes, lay down in the grass, and forget about all of it. Its good, you know, to just lie in the grass and forget there are a thousand other things you could be doing. Because when you're there on the ground, the rush of its welcome floods back into your memory for the first time since you last collapsed on the earth in exhausted exuberance when you were 12. We like to tell ourselves that there are always things we can be doing to improve ourselves, to be better at our jobs, our families, to be better versions of ourselves. There are self-help books and meditation journals and Bible studies and diet plans, all of which tell us that were not good enough just as ourselves. Most of us have probably accepted that as true, I know that I am always reading more books and trying to boost my GPA, all so I can go to grad school and get a degree and prove to somebody that I am good enough. Were all doing things to prove to someone that we are good enough. But how bad can you feel about yourself and the world when you lie in the grass looking at a half-paled sky and feeling how small you are? When you're on your back before the world, letting the mosquitoes bite you on every exposed bit of skin warmed by sun and moistened by humidity and sweat, your bills are smaller and your worries smaller and everything that preoccupies your mind is smaller--you as yourself is suddenly very small too, but your awareness of the world and its beauty increases tenfold.

I sound like a hippy, I realize, a feel good yuppie-type who thinks watching birds fly under clouds will make her life run more smoothly and her problems dissolve. No, not permanently, anyway. When I walk inside with soil-stained feet I will have to face the evidence of my fleeting life with a tangible brutality. But who can deny, after being silent before the peace a small patch of earth can offer, that there is indeed beauty left in this world? Just being a part of creation--whoever you believe created it--God, evolution, aliens, sea monkeys or the accidental explosion of space dust--is something spiritual. Who can take a pure communion with the ground you walk on and not see it as something holy, intentional, grand? I pushed a beetle from my arm with a stick and thought about the reasons of the universe--why is it here, whom does it glorify, how am I a part of this creation? I heard the crickets buzz unseen in grass around me and I wondered not how they fit in the ecosystem, but why there is even an environment to begin with. We are so small as humans, small even in comparison with the world, smaller still in light of the galaxy and universe, that it seems really inexplicable that we should have a place in the universe at all. What do we offer it, really? Our advancements of technology and thought are replaced every hundred years or so, and sometimes I feel like our advancements in theory and formula are rather violently destroying anything we feel of love and passion, truth and question. And does the universe need our emotion, our thoughts? I hardly think it does, and yet there is something beautiful in them still, in our place here, lying on the grass in the dark, looking up at a half-paled sky and just wondering why.