The infinite variety of creation

Photo: Butterfly Conservation

Last weekend we had the fun of having our grandchildren and their parents to stay. When one’s surrounded by news of bereavement and illness it’s easy to be overwhelmed by sadness – and to forget that there’s much to enjoy. For example, just this minute a yellow brimstone butterfly has settled on the mini cauldron of deep mauve violas which have been flowering non-stop since some good friends gave them to Jane last autumn. Now it has bounced away over the garden in the spring sunshine, while a wren sings with its surprising piercing trill on our fence. I wonder whether this year it will complete its nest in the eaves of our neighbour’s garage. I think the males build a number of nests – and last year this one wasn’t used.  

Observer's Book of Birds

And yesterday evening we were at my favourite coffee shop, Cornerstone in Grove, with some good friends. We watched a three-minute video clip, which Tim described as the macro and the micro. It’s called Cosmic Eye. It starts with a girl, Louise, lying on a lawn in Google headquarters in California, and pans out fast through the universe and beyond to the limits of our knowledge and then reverses the process into her eye until it reaches the opposite limits of our knowledge to quarks and beyond, before bringing us back to the human being lying on the grass. Some of us understood it better than others. The big unanswered question, according to Tim, is what’s the unifying theory bringing the cosmic and the quantum together. Being a simple non-scientist, I was left with a sense of awe at the extraordinary diversity of existence.

I’m reminded of the most memorable lectures I went to in Cambridge, which were given by Professor Donald MacKinnon, not about my subject, English, but about philosophy. Besides his eccentricity and the gripping intensity of his engagement with the topic, I particularly remember one phrase of his, “the infinite variety of creation” or maybe “of nature”. I remember I thought at the time, “Yes, that’s the excitement of being alive.”