Is Seeing Believing?
Could there be more out there than meets the eye?
It may be so, just like it was impossible to predict the forces that led to this week’s wave election.
On faith or evidence, the world is full of believers in forces unseen, seldom seen and selectively seen.
Believers in God and gods live in a universe populated by alternative species. Classified with military precision, their supernatural numbers range from the Supreme Being, or Beings, down to flitting sprites and cute little cherubim and putti. As with mortal armies, there are legions of both good guys and bad guys. Devils have their own hierarchy, and names, just as angels do.
Divine beings above and below are recognized by faith, though lucky — or not so lucky — mortals among us may be selected for encounters. Who knows when the devil might appear with a bargain we had best refuse? Is he or she waiting in the wings for the presidential election two years hence?
Far better to meet Mary mother of God updating her appearances at Guadalupe and Fatima.
Other kinds of beings — who knows who or what — animate searchers of the sky to amplify their sight and hearing, even travel into space in hopes of alien encounters.
Ghost hunters, as we wrote last week, are just as determined if not quite so technologically sophisticated as pollsters.
Artists and writers give as much attention to these parallel universes — plus worlds of giants, dwarfs and leprechauns — as to our plain old ordinary one. Who knows what such fantasticists really see — and what we don’t see.
Worlds out of sight are close at hand as well as distant in space and place. Ordinary Earth is layered with life beyond plain sight. Has every bird in the Amazon forest been seen and classified? Every life form in the deep, dark sea? Every bacteria and virus longing to infect us?
There’s way more to the world of the small than meets the eye. As numerous as angels in the heavens or stars in the sky are life forms that we’d never see without wonder glasses that magnify our eyesight so we can peer into their secret minuscule worlds. Cells are multiplying, atoms spinning all around us.
Even the leaves on the trees are shaking with surprises. Summer’s green fades, revealing yellow, orange, red and purple that were there, invisibly, all along.
What else in plain sight are we missing?
Election Day plus one holds other orders of revelation. Pollsters have devised multi-million-dollar methodologies in the political science of reading human preference. Yet how we vote remains a morning-after surprise.
(Good thing, for how many would run if pollsters certified the winner on Day One?)
The news of November 5 is that True Blue Maryland has a Republican governor. Throughout the state and Chesapeake Country, dark horses have won and favorites lost.
In such a world of wonders, why shouldn’t there be more fish in the sea? In our great Chesapeake Bay, is Chessie impossible? I haven’t seen the creature that goes by that name, but many have. This week, when the impossible comes to be, we offer you four decades of testimony from Chessie sighters, brought up to date by Chris Gardner’s most recent sighting this August.
In additional homage to what we may not see, our story is told by the ghost of Bill Burton.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]