Finding beauty in a morning bowl of bacteria.
I was eating my yoghurt with blueberries this morning, and I noticed the beautiful patterns the violet streaks of blueberry juice created against the stark white contrast of my yoghurt.
I thought, this is just as beautiful as a beautiful vein of color in a slab of marble, isn’t it?
Then my mind took the other side of the argument. Marble is naturally beautiful and sought after, because of the specific conditions that cause it to be.
It is formed over thousands of millions of years by intense heat and pressure. The exact molecular compounds need to be present for the marble to form, and the veining is created by the random coincidence that certain impurities were present during the process.
These specific circumstances, and long time scale make marble a remarkable phenomena, it is such a fascinating and time-depended process, that when we can display it in our homes, we are displaying a portion of the evolution of the planet for all to see. We are expressing our appreciation for the magnificent forces of nature and their ability to create beauty out of basic mineral elements.
Comparing this solid, structural material that comes from depths of the earth, surely there can’t be any comparison. No one decorates their kitchen walls and countertops with a swirl of yoghurt.
But there is an equally valid argument to justify the beauty of yoghurt.
How did these blueberries and yoghurt get into my cup? When was yoghurt invented? It originated around 5000BC. It required the domestication of milk-producing livestock. That depended on humans changing from a hunter-gatherer species into agriculturally based societies. That was dependent on the evolution of the species that homo-sapiens originated from, and the species they evolved from, and so on, stretching back to the first living organism ever to inhabit the earth. That time scale is 3.7 billion years, longer even than it took the marble to form.
If humans had not evolved, there would still be marble in the ground. If humans had not evolved, there would never be yoghurt anywhere. Arguably, yoghurt is more refined, rare and has more history than a beautiful slab of marble. The same can be said for blueberries. There is probably marble on some far distant planet since the requisite elements can be found throughout the universe. However as far as we know, there are no blueberries anywhere else in the universe. Those require something special, very special, that is – life.
So in my casual morning cup of yoghurt, we can see that it contains within it all of human history and evolution, the miracle of life existing on our planet, and by those standards, we can say it is equally as beautiful as the marble it vaguely resembles.
I say equally, because we can see both objects of our comparison are equally rare, difficult to create, have history behind them, and represent the macrocosm of the natural world. Linking back the causes and effects that led to these items to exists, until we find their cause, we have to travel ALL THE WAY back. That is, 13.8 billion years to the beginning of the universe.
If the cloud of plasma initially released by the big bang hadn’t cooled in a specific pattern, those patterns wouldn’t have formed hydrogen clouds of different densities, and without the specific densities of those clouds, they wouldn’t be drawn together into stars, and without stars forming, they would not explode many millions of years later, and without exploding stars, the elements would not have been formed, and without elements, the earth would not have coalescent out of a cloud of space dust, and without the earth forming, the rocks wouldn’t be here, without earth forming, life would not have formed.
Without life forming, we would not have evolved, without evolving, we would not have created yoghurt.
The same time scale, and dependency upon everything in the universe unfolding the exact way that it did, we would have neither marble nor yoghurt. So we must see and appreciate both with equal wonder, reverence and respect.
In fact, everything in the world, anything you perceive can be looked at this way. It exists as a result of everything that ever was. Remove one atom ten billion years ago, and things are very different today.
Be thankful for the way things have unfolded to the point where you have eyes and sufficient understanding of language to read this, and be grateful for your yoghurt with blueberries, and the marble on the countertop.