Bubbles [part 1]

A bubble is commonplace and ordinary. It's part of washing your hands, your hair, your car, and certain baths. Blowing bubbles is something many children do all the time, so it becomes very ordinary to some children too. So ordinary, that it's easy to overlook the tiny miracle that a bubble is.

Here's what I find incredible about a bubble:

• They come into being on your breath. What else does that?
• They form a perfect, perfect sphere, and they float.
• They reflect the world in incredibly high resolution, upside down, but a perfect reflection from one location, much perhaps, like we do, as individuals with a location in space.
• They are rainbow: they have this whirling, spinning layer of iridescence, all the colors, swiftly moving all around their surface, even while the images of trees, people, and houses they reflect are fixed in relation to these objects in the world they appear to float through.
• They bounce on fluid surfaces: try it in the bath, try it at a lake, try it next to the salt sea.
• They can be carried distances and lifted up high by the wind.
• And most notable of all, they are suddenly gone. Sometimes leaving a circle of soapy wet behind them but often just suddenly not there.

Next time you are in the presence of a bubble, see it as a whole life, see it as significant as your own life, the floaty path it takes, your path. It's remarkable existence, yours. It's sudden disappearance, just like yours will be, the moment when you are no longer in the world, reflecting its details, swirling with changing tints and hues, perfect, fleeting, a marvel.