Small things are difficult to see. The smallest things are difficult even to imagine. We are missing life at its smallest, overlooking living things that came before us and make us possible. We need to look inside the box more appreciatively.

OPEN this terrific graphic from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah for a trip into the world of small. Click on the slider, slide it to the right, and zoom in past a sesame seed, past a skin cell, then a blood cell,  a bacterium, all the way down to viruses, molecules, and finally a carbon atom. It’s a wild trip. 

The zoom takes you down into the roots of life. It also takes you back in time. Back billions of years, from complex single-celled creatures and building blocks towards the not–alive viruses that may predate full reproductive life, back to one of the atoms that makes it all possible. Small came first. And life stayed small for a long time.

Then it got bigger. Humans are not only complex but relatively large. Elephants, whales, and trees grow larger than we do, but hundreds of species of everything from dogs to Humans are not only complex but also relatively large. Elephants, whales and trees grow larger than we do, but hundreds of species, from cows to ordinary bushes, come in our size range. Up to a point and with exceptions, a bigger body survives longer.

Perhaps this trend underlies our perceptions of authority and even spirituality. The entities that we worship in any sense of that word are bigger than we are—not only gods but powerful people who seem ‘larger than life,’ or the universe itself, or Nature. They are the somethings–larger than we are often seeking. We grant even big trees and elephants a majesty that we don’t attribute to bushes and mice. Large things, if we think they are friendly, offer inclusion and protection.

But we don’t usually feel that warm about tiny things. That’s partly because we simply can’t see them. I wonder what it would be like if we were able to see individual bacteria, skin cells, the cells in a piece of fruit in the same way that we can easily see even individual blades of grass. Imagine seeing the single–celled creatures floating in the air and in the water and on our skin, on other skins, in our food, in our rooms. Would we feel enveloped by life in the way that we do when walking in a forest or watching flocks of birds? If we could see all those individual cells pumping, crawling, swimming, dividing, could we find our something–larger in those somethings–smaller?