Cave Paintings and Growing into the Void

Message in a Bottle 23

I like watching aerial nature videos. You know, like directly above looking down, an eagle's view as she soars. Bonus if there’s lots of animals, like a group of penguins swimming in and out of green-hued ice ponds. Otters floating on waves. Elephants marching across the Savannah. A mama tiger and her babies, just living, just being. There’s something so intimate about that bird’s eye view. The animals seem to have no cognition of being filmed and I am able to observe, to see without affecting. Without leaving any trace.

I think there’s a kind of pervasive obsession with leaving one’s mark. Ever since cave paintings and pyramids, humans have an innate need to make a change, stake a claim on their temporary power, or maybe just leave proof that they lived. We are transient here on earth, but maybe our monuments will endure … at least enough to prove we existed. Because if others don’t know, what’s the point of existing at all, hmm?

Cue existential spiral.

More often than not I’m the complete opposite. What they call a chronic observer. I’d rather sit out and watch my athletic friends than jump in the game. As a teen, youth group was a nightmare for me. There, if you don’t participate, you’re someone to worry about, to fret over and try again and again to convince to participate. It’s no surprise I just stopped going.

I spent too long a period of time in dire loneliness for me to be uncomfortable with it now. It was terrifying and painful for some time. If I didn’t have my family, hardly a soul would have even vaguely known my name, and that was a thought that haunted me relentlessly. But I think it lasted so long, I grew into the void. I found the emptiness spacious enough for my overgrown imagination. It was a place I could run, make a muck and ruckus, and move freely in. It’s where I began to write. 

If I’m gonna leave my mark, I prefer to do it in quiet ways, like little letters to people who want to hear from me. If I’m not careful, I’m in danger of letting the world pass me by.

I like watching aerial videos the same way I love heights, finding paradise vantage points, and just enjoying the view. There is something simplifying and oddly “grounding” in watching the world from above. My safe distance to ingest and digest, my observer’s perch. I know it’s a big bucket list ask, but I hope to one day see Earth from space. Not in a picture or video but with my own eyes. Any astronauts willing to take me on a trip to a space station, my schedule’s wide open.

Yes I’m untouchable from the aerial view, and that is a thought that instills safety, but perhaps what’s even more comforting is the idea that what I’m viewing is out of my reach. Free to observe. Impossible to screw it up. I can’t wreck it with me. Maybe it’s not a great thing. But maybe it’s not such a terrible thing either.

An obsession with being known can be just as easy a carcinogen.

Sometimes we aren’t remembered very long as the ones who made the change. But when we are in people's lives, we inevitably change them— their perspective on something, their knowledge on a subject, sometimes we silly humans even adopt each other's unconscious habits. Even if the effects are subtle, they’re there and will then pass to our children and their children and so on …

I think in some form or fashion, we all want to change the world (in the macro grand scheme), even little observers like me. But how much more beautiful is it to change someone’s world (the micro, the unseen).

I may never be the type of person to want to leave huge lasting marks on the world, but I do long for a day when we, all of us, are more okay with messy, human living. Stressing less, and allowing for some of our marks to be doodles, mistakes, smudges on the canvas.

-Ellie