A weed plucked at the side of the path [I walked daily] might have found its way to the New World in a seventeenth-century sailing ship. Scratches on a rocky ledge evoke colossal mountain-building events on the other side of the world millions of years ago that modified the planet's climate and caused glaciers to creep across New England. The oxygen atoms I suck into my lungs were forged in stars that lived and died long before the Earth was born.
Having learned to know and love my path in all of its local abundance, the light-years and the eons no longer seem quite so forbidding, tropical rain forests and droughty deserts seem not so far away. A minute lived attentively can contain a millennium; an adequate step can span the planet.
— Chet Raymo, The Path