Up yours, Mount Rushmore

I looked up into the night sky as a big, bright moon cast subtle shadows in my peripheral vision. A feathery cloud formation skittered across the horizon in a single line, stretching for miles. It looked exactly like an x-ray of a human spinal column.

"Cool.", I said. Because it was.

The moon is thought to have the face of a gentle, mirthful man.
The sun is a powerful king that we do not dare to look directly at. Rock formations are "old men" or President Kennedy
God is jealous and vengeful, or loving and forgiving.
Nature is a mother(fucker).

We like to attribute human qualities to things in the natural world. It appeals to our egos and eases our fears that we might be every bit as insignificant as dustmites. By having something of our likeness reflected on a grand scale, it confirms our suspicions (and hope) that we are the best thing going in this world.

But since nature can't be counted on to regularly stick her tongue down the backs of our trousers, we mostly have to stroke our own egos.

So we put up thousands of bronze statues of ourselves in city parks, create The Academy Awards, and the Nobel Prize, and use T.N.T. to blast our faces into mountain sides. Such a huge expanse of energy and time for no other reason that to be able to say, "Aren't we the shit?!".

We're really no better than some insipid, insecure celebrity who buys his own star for the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

All of our self-aggrandizing pomp is tacky and tawdry when compared to the graceful, quiet ease in which a gargantuan rendering of a spinal column can appear in the sky, incomprehensible and sublime for a few short minutes, and then just slowly fizzle away.