The TH Design Blog!

I was looking for a photo or illustration to use in our early-summer homepage banner when I came across this illustration by Andrey Pavlov, via Istockphoto. He described it simply as “team of ants launching astronaut to the moon, teamwork, fantasy” and I was charmed.

There was a message for me in the image but I couldn’t quite articulate it. So I went into my poetry stash looking for verses that would somehow relate, and found the poem The Seeking of the Waterfall by John Greenleaf Whittier, which begins:

They left their home of summer ease
Beneath the lowland’s sheltering trees,
To seek, by ways unknown to all,
The promise of the waterfall.

It then tells the story of how the seekers, venturing out of their “sheltered trees” and embarking “by ways unknown to all” climbed and toiled and followed the beckoning hints of success, but never found the waterfall. They despair, but “one with years grown wiser” consoles them by reminding them of all the beautiful places they saw during their quest. He expresses the idea that seeking is its reward—both because people discover other wonderful things along the way (out in the world and within themselves), and because people benefit from trying to find that which is beautiful, whatever form it takes, even if it is unattainable. Such efforts inspire the imagination and engender flashes of the divine.

There are two verses from the poem on our homepage. The first ends with this line:

We follow where before us runs
the vision of the shining ones

I thought for awhile about who or what represents “the shining ones” to me and ultimately decided that to me, “shining ones” are people who not only try to do things, they try to do good things. People that improve the world by their presence and their actions. Little things, big things. Things the world will notice and things only a few will notice. Things maybe animals will notice, or rivers or eco-systems.

And I thought the poem meshed perfectly with the image of ambitious ants, trying to get to the moon. Obviously they’ll fail, but who knows what they’ll gain in the process of trying?