Gasp

Image from here. Originally found via this lovely post.

Sometimes, interwebs, you do not disappoint.  Sometimes I find the most beautiful, unusual, inspiring images out there.  They remind me, when I am stuck in a rut, when my world looks and feels small and wholly known to me, when looking out at my horizon feels flat and blasé and ho-hum and yeah, yeah, got it -- these images remind me of how big the world can be.  

Forget the universe...my minds reels at the numbers, at explanations of light-years, of quantum this and particle that, until I feel in my gut that it's all elaborate smoke and mirrors by a particularly remote Oz.  No, planet earth, terra firma, is large and mysterious enough for me, thank you. 

The gorgeous reading room above is something from a dream, something imagined in some wee early morning, when I pull up the coverlet against chilly air and burrow deeper, with some half-remembered nostalgia for Christmas, for snow, for another life, not yet lived. 

If the shot above is the interior world of that half-dream, than here is what it looks like, just out the windows:

Image found (and available for purchase) here.

According to the Flickr comments on the first photo, that library or reading room is somewhere in either the Netherlands or perhaps Germany.  The bottom photograph is of New York City.

But it's my dream, my imagined universe.  If I find it hard to imagine a life where  I'd ever need a full-body parka to brave the cold out my front door, or be able to sit in an old, old room surrounded by beauty and history, I can look out there, into the ever-expanding universe of the web, and find images to make such undreamed corners of the earth possible, seem like places that I might visit, might even inhabit.  Someday.