Once upon a time, before there was time, a person stood upon the top of a wall, looking out over all that was theirs to survey, and also looking within the depths of a planet they held in their hand.
Now. This is one of those things that sounds quite impossible (and so it is) but is also something that each of us can do every day (and so we do). This person did it a bit more literally, granted, but that doesn’t make what you can do or what I can do any less true. Consider: We can, and must, observe what is around us, and observation is done best with a bit of perspective. To step back from the world that surrounds us isn’t to be removed from it, but to gain a critical bit of clarity. To be able to say, “Oh, that stream runs to that larger river there,” or, “The birds that fly south are seeking warmth, not escape.” Stepping back, up, away, allows one to see what is happening not in a truer way, but in a different way, than being right in the thick of things.
And consider, too: Where we can observe, we can act. Each person has some agency – many of us less than we ought, and some of us far less than we ought, because neither this world nor any other has yet been perfected (let us all keep working to perfect it), but still some. With agency we can shape, and shaping is an act of creation and of faith. The world held in our hands is not as tangible, perhaps, as the one that surrounds us, but it has the benefit of being of us, imbued by its creator with that same faith and that same creativity. Shaping and holding something that is impossible and that may never be is, in effect, to dream consciously. And when dreams end, and the dreamer awakes, perhaps those swirling mists of mystery are set out into the wider world, to shape what is into what may be, if only a little.
Once upon a time, on a day very like this one (or any other one), a person stood back, for a moment, to take in the world as it was, to see it in all its beauty and all its imperfection. And then, this person who shared your name or my name or the name of every person any of us have met before, did the sacred, faithful work of shaping a world that was a dream and yet might, one day, become more.