The universe exhales, and in that breath a galaxy pirouettes like a dancer’s skirt, its spiral arms glittering with the sequins of a trillion stars. Each point of light holds court over worlds, and on one blue marble, smaller than a dust mote in the cosmic ballroom, clouds swirl like cream in coffee.
Beneath those clouds, a child stands in a meadow, arms spread wide as if to embrace the sky. To her, the world is vast, the horizon an impossible distance, the ancient oak beside her a towering giant. She is the center, the fixed point around which everything spins.
But zoom closer: her eye, a universe unto itself, where light dances across the iris like aurora borealis. Deeper still… through the lens, past the retina, into the electric symphony of neurons firing like miniature lightning. Smaller, smaller, until atoms waltz in mostly empty space, their electrons clouding around nuclei like bees around flowers.
And in the heart of one atom, in the space between spaces, the quantum foam bubbles with the same creative chaos that births galaxies. Here, at the edge of existence, the boundary between something and nothing blurs until – like a mobius strip twisting back upon itself – we emerge again into vastness, where universes bloom like wildflowers in an infinite meadow, and somewhere, a child stands with arms spread wide.
