A World in a Grain of Sand

When I was about 12 I got a microscope for Christmas. I don’t remember whether I asked for it or not, and I later realized that it was just an inexpensive, simple instrument. It soon became the most precious thing I owned.

The microscope opened my eyes to a world that was hidden. Wonderful things that were invisible to the naked eye became visible, things that I had not even imagined.

I was at an age when I was starting to question what I had been told all my life. The magnificent images under the microscope, the revealed truths, made more sense to me than what the nuns said about angels and holy ghosts and devils that I would never see. The natural world started to take its place in my world of spirituality.

So, what did I look at? I went through the kitchen and examined every powder I could find: sugar, salt, powdered sugar, brown sugar, cornstarch, cornmeal, and on and on. One of my favorite tricks was to take a drop of saltwater and watch as the water dried and the salt formed crystals across the slide, growing from specks to building-sized cubes. I could see the molasses specks in the brown sugar that gave it color. The finest powdered sugar was still made of crystals.

The outside world was full of wonders. I examined the scales on butterfly wings, the lacy pattern of flies’ wings, all kinds of bee parts and ant legs and spiders’ eyes. The microscope made me aware of the variety of life around me, and as I explored my back yard I was constantly on the alert for more subjects for examination.

You can hardly imagine the different structures and materials in sand, all sizes and colors and transparencies of tiny crystals and cubes. Hair is scaly, not smooth; the edge of a razor blade is ragged, not sharp. The fiber from every fabric and animal is distinctive.

The biological and botanical worlds are full of wonder. Under the microscope every plant, flower, and animal had secrets to reveal. I used to catch a guppy from my aquarium, wrap it in wet cotton wool, then watch as blood cells traveled single file through capillaries in the tail. Blood, skin, leaves, and dust bunnies all willingly gave up their secrets.

There is a world in a grain of sand, but an even more fascinating one in a drop of pond water. A seemingly clear drop of water could contain creatures more interesting than anything in a zoo. I would watch for on hour as an amoeba slithered across my slide or a paramecium moved its slipper foot along looking for the other creatures. At least it would until the water dried up!

My world was never the same. I would take fewer things on faith and believe fewer things that I could not discover for myself. I would be a hard critic, but not so much that I could not appreciate the truth in, say, the poetry of William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour”