<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Tiny stones. I stopped, gazed down at them curiously.&nbsp;</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Jessi_kramer.JPG" style="width: 300px; height: 180px; float: right;" />We&rsquo;ve all been there.</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Walking along that life path--</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Then all of a sudden, the lie settles down and makes itself comfortable in our minds and we think,</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Why am I so <em>small</em>?</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">It can take different forms:</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I am not enough.</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I don&rsquo;t have what it takes.</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I can never measure up.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">These thoughts jarred my peaceful evening stroll. I was overwhelmed and confused by my &ldquo;littleness&rdquo;, staring downward, dully, at my feet, too self-absorbed to lift my eyes upward and around, too burdened to cultivate awareness and childlike wonder.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Then--</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Tiny stones on the road.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Just bits of gravel, really.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Probably thousands of them.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Thousands of macroscopic manifestations of tiny mineral components.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">How is it that everything big owes it all to things that are small?</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Without the small, there would be no big.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Jessi_kramer2.jpg" style="width: 300px; height: 300px; float: left;" />We don&rsquo;t like the small. At least, we&rsquo;re taught not to like it. Sure, small spring flowers, small songbirds, even small microbes in the soil--some people, increasingly fewer people, enjoy those. But &ldquo;small&rdquo; houses, &ldquo;small&rdquo; salaries, &ldquo;small&rdquo; goals and ambition, &ldquo;small&rdquo; careers, &ldquo;small&rdquo; talents or a &ldquo;small&rdquo; social life--those are frowned upon. We are afraid to admit--discouraged from admitting--that we just want to do well with that which is simple, that which is &ldquo;small&rdquo;. That we want more &ldquo;be-ing&rdquo; and less &ldquo;do-ing&rdquo;--or at least less of the do-ing that doesn&rsquo;t flow true from the be-ing. But the world shouts at us, and we cower.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">So we strive. And if we don&rsquo;t, we feel like something may be wrong with us. We strive for more. To be &ldquo;enough&rdquo;. To do &ldquo;enough&rdquo;. To have &ldquo;enough&rdquo;--and &ldquo;enough&rdquo; has very flexible, mostly expanding contours.*&nbsp; Enough, though it implies a boundary, rarely has a stopping point in our world.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">And by believing the lie, our relationships with God&hellip;others&hellip;ourselves&hellip;the natural world...are distorted, tainted.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The rocks want to teach us something. God hides lessons everywhere in His created world. His lessons are as grand and as subtle as His seemingly paradoxical nature, as countless as He is limitless.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I have not mentioned yet why I stopped upon glimpsing the little bits of gravel.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">It was not because there were thousands of them. And to my unaided eye, they weren&rsquo;t very pretty either--not sparkly, no obvious patterns or interesting colors.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">It was because of their shadows.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">These stones had shadows much larger than themselves, incredible shadows, jutting out from beneath them onto that winding country road among the pines.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The rocks were very insignificant in and of themselves--tiny, easy to miss, a bit boring to be honest. And yet, by simply being in the light of the setting sun, not by struggling or striving or grasping for a &ldquo;bigger&rdquo; identity, they made a most striking image. They were striking enough that I--a person who struggles to cultivate wonder at an age when apathy easily creeps in and pure childlike imagination is mostly lost--paused, knowing something was there that I was not supposed to miss.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">If the stones were not exactly as they were, in the puzzling glory of their smallness, I may not have stopped. It was partly because they were so small that I was so impressed. How could such a tiny, seemingly insignificant, seemingly purposeless thing play a role in creating such beauty? If those stones, easily glanced-over by many eyes, had not been there, I wouldn&rsquo;t have stopped at that particular place on that old country road. My life would be different. It would lack something. No stones, no striking shadows.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Without the small, there would be no big.</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The rocks cry out--can you hear them?</span></div>
<div>
	&nbsp;</div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The little rocks simply were. They were be-ing.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">And the sun was.</span></div>
<div>
	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">And you, being, are. And He is.</span></div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
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	&nbsp;</div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">&nbsp;*Powers, W. (2010). <em>Twelve by twelve: A one-room cabin off the grid &amp; beyond the American dream.</em> Novato, CA: New World Library.</span></div>
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	<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">To read more from Au Sable&#39;s Environmental Education Interns, check out our eMagazine&nbsp;<a href="{filedir_5}SFATP_spring-summer_2016_compressed.pdf">here</a>!</span></div>
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