In my hiking posts I’ve written about, or tried to anyway, that feeling I get when I’m in nature. It instantly makes me feel better and more in tune with myself. I can walk around for hours even on a rainy cloudy mountain with no views to speak of and never get the slightest bit bored.

How is it that we, and all this around us, are here at all?!

Featured on Atoms with Consciousness from The Marginalian, Richard Feynman’s “ode to the wonder of life” captures some of that feeling that is impossible to really articulate.

[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]
by Richard Feynman

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

Here is an animated version with music by Yo-Yo Ma: