It’s summer and I’ve just finished cutting the grass and I’m lying on my back with my sunglasses on wearing my ripped checkered stained shorts I always wear when I do lawn work and no shirt and a bunch of tan lines that represent I’ve spent the summer working outside for prolonged moments during the hottest points of the summertime day.

I could dive into the sky and the blue would barely register a ripple, but today I’m content to gaze up and into its expanse and wonder when the whole thing will come crashing down upon me. I grow smaller or the blades of the grass grow taller and I find myself sinking deep into my lawn – the stalks rise like a forest of green Greek pillars and I tumble further and further into their embrace.

With startling clarity, the speed of my minimization increases and I find myself rapidly and frighteningly surrounded by this strange new world. Beetles and bumblebees and ants and butterflies wiggle their antennae in greeting before bustling past in search of food or mates or sanctuary or whatever their peripheral senses have devised of importance.

I want to communicate, but just as soon as I’ve slowed my descent, I’ve begun to shrink again. The bugs slip from young siblings to equals to pugnacious older brothers to imposing kings and demons and gods. They leer at me with a hundred eyes and a hundred snapping pincers and their wings painfully smash the air and their claws roar and tear the ground to pieces.

Pellets of dirt balloon into boulders and still I fall. The green forest fades from significance and my family disappears and still I fall. I crumble into the black and burrow deep into its enveloping hug.

Through the darkness, pinpoints of light blink and smile and spin cyclones of ethereal glittering dust. The sun gleams brilliantly, but my eyes remain firmly placed on the most familiar of blue orbs.

I adjust my trajectory and enter the atmosphere somewhere over Texas. The barren fields and valleys and mountains lay under my feet – flat and inexpressive – as I tumble further toward green pastures. By the time I cross the Philadelphia airspace I can pick out individual buildings and can make up individual stories for each of the ants congregating around the city.

Another moment and I’ve spotted the reflective glint of our solar panels, the light fills each pore and bursts out again through my eyes and ears and mouth – I’m a spinning disco ball on a collision course with the earth.

And down I dive into the green sea behind my house, the forest rises up and the stalks state their appeal and the bugs whisper their hellos and buffet the wind into my face and loom like giants and fade into gods, but the lights blink so so soothingly and then there’s that familiar blue orb and another moment and I’ve returned to the lawn – with only a slightly damp pair of armpits as evidence of my trip.