Earth As Dining Room

Similes, metaphors are fun and often revealing. The neighbourhood, the house are the galaxy. The dining room is earth. Around the dining table, family-important events occur. The table, the chairs make the room. The furniture is strong. It has to be, to uplift and carry. Here, at the table, seated on  chairs,  is where we gather to celebrate, to share, to consume and serve. The table and chairs are  what provides  care and control, learning and security. They support. Without the scientific, legal, religious, political. technical, military, social and educative elements, there would be no progress and safety. Without the solidity of the table and chairs, there would be nothing human:  no reason to make an effort or regard life as having a future. They hold all that matters. On the table, is the cutlery, the pottery, the food, napkins: "we the people". We're noisy, breakable, bendable, useful, expensive, expendable and demanding. We're busy and pretty and ugly and lazy. We can be uplifted, broken and changed but without what goes on the table, there is no reason for the rest. It's the busy productive and destructive part of the whole. In the centre of this very roiling, frantic, clashing, clanking, messy, pretty business, is the centrepiece. The centrepiece is without visible flaw. It's all that is good and beautiful and true. It is a perfect central focus for the entire room. It is the delicate epitome of all that we stand for in the hard, diverse world of colour and sound and soul and unity and disunity. It is richness and beauty and godliness and the idea of immortality. It isn't real, it is contrived and constructed and made of flowers and ribbons and reeds and wires and string and glue, but no one cares as long as it is attractive. It's the  the lotto, the Everest, the Oscar, the four star general,  the UN, the American Dream, the Canadian Mosaic, Disneyland, the TV idol,the European Union, and OPEC and EPA and NASA and all else. It's the ideal: the royalty, the godliness, the filthy rich, the heroic, the glamourous, the creative, the genius, the Heaven, the karma, the Mecca, the Wall.  It's what we all believe we strive for, the epitome of mankind. We know that it's fake, but it's the ideal that counts. It's what we unwittingly strive to attain and realize that for the vast majority of us, is unattainable. But we must have it: the dream to look upon that gives us a distraction that makes our daily lives appear to have meaning, something to reach for  even though we may never hold it. We don't mind. It is the beauty that completes the dining room of earth and gives us something to look up to and to hope for and who knows, perhaps achieve. The galaxy, the house, the dining room earth, are all we are, all we need and all we have.