From SRP author Tracy Cooper-Posey:
It’s probably not a huge surprise to you that I have dozens of notebooks that go back…well, many years.
I have a large curiousity bump, and a great many things knock against it. Many of them, I squirrel away in my notebooks for one day. One day I’ll learn more about that thing. One day I’ll use it in a story. Or just: “oh, this is cool!”
Many of the notes are photographs and images, many of them without captions. So I thought I would share some of them here, because despite the years since I clipped them, I still haven’t found a place to use them.
Today’s photo grabbed me, first, because of the scale. I had to stare at the photo for a while.
At first, it didn’t make sense. It looked like farmland, or storage units, or some kind of industrial grid laid out with obsessive precision. Then the scale started to sink in. The roads. The repetition. The sheer size of it.
And then came the part that stopped me.
They’re tents.
This is Mina, in Saudi Arabia—a city of tents set up for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Hundreds of thousands of them. Enough to house millions of people.
Millions.
Every year.
Not the same people, either. Different faces, different lives, all converging on the same place for the same reason. A human movement so vast it reshapes the landscape, organizes itself into geometry, and then disappears again.
I knew, in the abstract, that Hajj was one of the largest gatherings in the world. You hear that sort of thing. It gets filed away with other facts you don’t really process. But this image makes it visible. And it left me with an uncomfortable thought.
In Victorian times, they understood instinctively that the world was a vast, mostly unexplored place. They could write stories about lost cities and secret worlds and no one rolled their eyes at the idea.
Fast forward a hundred years plus: We like to think we’re wired into everything now. That the internet has made the world transparent. That nothing truly large can happen without us knowing about it, seeing it, understanding it.
Yet something on this scale; millions of people moving, gathering, performing rituals that have existed for centuries, can still sit almost entirely outside our awareness. Not hidden. Just…not seen. Or perhaps more accurately: not noticed. There’s a difference.
I’m aware, even as I write this, of how little I actually know about what those people are doing, or why. I could look it up. Fill in the gaps. Turn this into something more informed, more complete. But I’m not sure that’s the point.
The point is that I didn’t know. Not really.
And if something this vast can slip past the edges of my understanding, then I have to wonder how much else is out there—equally immense, equally important to millions of people—that I simply haven’t seen yet.
And that’s an unsettling thought. It’s also an intriguing one. How much does that unseen, unnoticed world influence our lives? Scale makes a difference. If a cricket eats a leaf, we don’t see it. But if millions of them gather and eat leaves, entire crops are lost.
How do these unseen, massive events and things change our lives without being noticed? How much could they change our lives, if they wanted to?
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Tracy Cooper-Posey
SRP Author