The Dwarf in the Center of His World

The panorama of the world ranges all about me – I am the unimportant midpoint of the whole.
 
Millennia ago a dwarf, my ancestor, faced four main tasks.
 
1.  For mutual benefit, life in community with others.
2.  To gather experience and to learn.
3.  Productive creativity – craftsmanship.
4.  To render care to personal love.

Around this sparse field of action lay – imagined infinite and eternal – a domain of spirit beings. The best known became the Indo-European sky gods and the single deity of revealed religion.

From occasions of good will and fellowship in the community and particles of time of happiest love, the dwarf reasoned – not provably but quite logically – a perfected heavenly abode.

That land “unknowable” is not the modern dwarf’s chief concern. His once tight field of endeavor has expanded by community growth, research and study, and by manufacture. A widening belt of philosophy, learning, and of know-how now separates me and fellow dwarfs from the transcendent realm.

Nature has set us bodily into the center of our world. Through Renaissance and Humanism, Enlightenment and Modernity, we have made that our own resolve.