The vastness

Had a good all hands with the rest of Mozilla in San Francisco (at least those able and willing to attend due to the current political situation in the U.S.). I stayed a few extra days to hang out with some of my friends who had moved to S.F. On Sunday we went to Muir Woods, where I took this picture:

It occurred to me at the time that I took that photo that pretty much every sensory receptor in my optic nerve was registering the signal of some kind of life. Thousands of beings (trees, clover, moss, lichens) in turn made up of trillions upon trillions of tiny beings (cells, bacteria) all conscious and interacting with each other in ways that I can barely begin to understand.