Small things are difficult to see. The smallest things are difficult even to imagine. We are missing life at its smallest, overlooking living things that came before us and make us possible. We need to look inside the box more appreciatively.

For a trip into this world of small, open this graphic from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. Click on the slider, slide it to the right, and zoom down past a sesame seed, past a skin cell, then a blood cell, a bacterum, all the way down to viruses, molecules, and finally a carbon. atom. It’s a wild ride.

The zoom takes you down into the roots of life. It also takes you back in time–back billions of years from complex single-celled creatures and building blocks, back towards the not-alive viruses that may have predated full reproductive life, back to one of the atoms that has made it all possible. Small came first. And life stayed small for a long time.

Then it got bigger. Humans are not only complex but also relatively large. Elephants, whales and trees grow larger than we do, but hundreds of species, from cows to backyard shrubs, come in our size range. Up to a point and with exceptions, a bigger body survives longer.

Perhaps this trend underlies our perceptions of authority and even spirituality. The entities that we worship in any sense of that word are bigger than we are—not only gods but heroes who seem ‘larger than life,’ or the universe itself, or Nature. They may be the something–larger that we feel we are seeking. We grant to big trees and elephants a majesty that we don’t attribute to bushes and mice. Large things, if they seem friendly, offer inclusion and protection.

But we don’t usually feel all that warm about tiny things. That’s partly because we simply can’t see them. I wonder what it would be like if we were able to see individual bacteria, skin cells, the cells in a piece of fruit in the same way that we can easily see individual blades of grass. Imagine watching single–celled creatures floating in the air and in the water and on our skin, on other skins, in our food, in our rooms. Would we feel enveloped by life in the way that we do when walking in a forest or watching flocks of birds? If we could see all those individual cells pumping, crawling, swimming, dividing, could we find our something–larger in those somethings–smaller?