“The first man who actually measured the earth was a poet. The very idea of any man going out and taking the girth of the planet he lives on (and sometimes gets lost on) is in itself poetic. Wherever did he get the notion it could even be done? And just how did he do it? Didn’t it take a lot of apparatus, higher mathematics, and celestial engineering? Here if anywhere scientific curiosity mixes with poetic wonderment and they become the same thing.”

I remember vividly browsing in a secondhand store and opening a book randomly to that paragraph. How in the world could one guy be so lucky as to stumble across something like that? It doesn’t say much but it says a lot.

This is the way chapter three opens in Mapping by David Greenhood. He is writing about Ptolemy who was a resident of the ancient city of Alexandrea. He got it in his head that he could do this thing, measure the diameter of the earth and he did it with amazing accuracy, sort of in his backyard, well in 500 miles anyway. The book goes on to explain the method and calculations but we aren’t going there fascinating as that is, read the book.

What is important here is the idea, the fact that an individual can have a vision and act on it and accomplish something quite amazing. And not really an ego sort of thing but maybe closer to a contribution sort of thing. How do we rise above all the commotion of our lives and neighborhoods, so full of drama, to find a vision that is creative, different, helpful, inspiring. Are we capable of coming up with things on our own? Doesn’t it take organizations with resources, facilities and backing?

This whole notion of this possibility has been immensely inspirational to me. It is the sort of spirit of how Phil’s Camino came to be perhaps. There is a line in a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “Couldn’t it happen?” Well, couldn’t it?

All this really got started this morning with reading Sabbath Moments blog by Terry Hershey my neighbor and buddy. Last week he had a story about a young Iraqi woman who competed in an Olympic swimming event and came in 28th. Yea? Well, she recently escaped from Turkey across to one of the Greek islands with a group in a small motor boat. Along the way the motor conks out and she and a few others jump in and swim the boat to Greece. And this week he had a story about a Iraqi man, a cellist who came out on the street and played shortly after a car bomb went off and killed a bunch of innocents. The swimming to Greece to deliver the boat and the playing the cello even while the dust settled were beautiful examples of this ability to envision and act.

OK, 471 words, long winded. Thanks Terry, thanks David, thanks Ptolemy, thanks Iraqis for inspiring us. Love you all out there in the big world, Felipe.