Keep Looking Up

To The Moon.

Author: December 29, 2020 1 Comment

So there have been thirteen full moons in 2020, with the last one appearing tonight, December 29th, and in most years that would be a minor note of interest, but the fact that it’s 2020 casts a pallor over everything. It’s been the year of no cheer, three-hundred and sixty-six days in a haze, eight thousand eighty four hours of glower, twelve months of stormy fronths. And of all the numbers thirteen is considered the unluckiest. It’s the only number with its own phobia, triskaidekaphobia, which has its first recorded use, according to the OED, in 1911, which is ironic because if you add up the numbers in that year they only add up to twelve. There are hotels that skip the thirteenth floor and manufacturers who try to avoid putting the number 13 on their products. In Tarot decks the Death card is number 13 of the Major Arcana, and let’s not forget the Friday The 13th Movies that got increasingly terrible as they went on and it’s ironic that there are only twelve. At the Last Supper there was Jesus and the twelve apostles, which may be the origin of a belief that it’s unlucky to have thirteen dinner guests. Twelve is considered luckier, at least at the end of the year—traditionally there are twelve days of Christmas which used to mean celebrations could spill over into the new year.

What’s so special, or so dismal, about thirteen anyway? It’s an odd number but so is seven, usually considered the luckiest number. It’s also a prime number but those are also supposed to be lucky, or at least have their own special appeal.

And thirteen’s not always unlucky. Unless you’re counting calories it’s lucky to get a baker’s dozen, especially if you’re ordering doughnuts, there are Thirteen Postures in Tai Chi, and many cultures consider thirteen to be the beginning of adulthood. It’s the beginning of the teenage years so, yeah, I can see why that would be considered unlucky.

The significance of thirteen may ultimately be lunar in origin, though. Most years have twelve full moons. A year with thirteen isn’t unusual but occurs about every three or for years, so whether you consider it lucky or unlucky pretty much depends on the kind of year you’ve had.

Keep Looking Up

Moving Traditions.

Author: December 14, 2020 1 Comment

One of the things I’ve missed about not taking the bus this year, specifically this season, is seeing the decorations. I’ve missed my afternoon commute getting darker as the days get shorter but brightened with the lights that decorate houses and shops along the way. Most years my wife and I will also drive around the neighborhood to see how houses we pass by without a thought most of the year are decorated, taking on a new distinctiveness. There’s at least one house we used to go by on our way to work each morning that had both a giant inflatable Santa and an inflatable Hanukkah Bear, and it always made me smile even though I had another day at work ahead of me, but that’s another story.

Some years too we’ve driven out to the country to see the Geminids. It was too cloudy this year but I knew they were still there, and most nights I can look to the East and see Jupiter and Saturn getting closer and closer to conjunction, something that hasn’t happened in almost four centuries, and a reminder that even when we’re staying still the world under our feet and the universe we’re part of keeps moving.

This year especially these traditions hold out the hope that next year will be better.

 

 

Adventures In Busing., Keep Looking Up

Boundaries.

Author: July 17, 2020 9 Comments

Source: SkyView app for iPhone

The other night I stepped outside, just to the edge of the patio, away from the faint light cast from the window, and through the trees I could see a bright object. It was Jupiter, hanging high in the southeast in the constellation Sagittarius, with Saturn below and slightly to the east of it. Checking an astronomy app on my phone I could see that Pluto was there too. It’s too small to be seen without a telescope, but I thought it made an interesting addition: two planets and one ex-planet.

The boundaries of our solar system, and probably every other solar system, are fuzzy, and constantly changing. Even after Galileo proved Earth moved around the Sun and not the other way around Saturn was believed to be the most distant planet. And then came the discovery of Uranus in 1781, followed by Neptune in 1846, and Pluto was added in 1930, before being demoted to “dwarf planet” in 2006 because it’s one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Kuiper belt objects hanging out past the orbit of Neptune but still within the Sun’s grasp.

I went outside to check out the sky because I was looking for Mars. Like the Sun it was below the horizon, but still out there, out of sight but not out of mind. On July 30th, if all goes according to plan, NASA will launch the Perseverance rover, bound for Mars, due to arrive in February 2021, where it will search for life. That makes the name Perseverance especially fitting; scientists have been looking for and hoping to find life on Mars since, well, probably as long as it’s been understood that Mars was a planet like Earth. Scientists hoped and even expected to find at least vegetation on Mars until the probe Viking 1 sent back pictures in 1976 that showed what a cold, hostile place Mars is. And yet there’s also a persistent belief that, having landed humans on the Moon, Mars is our next big leap.

Mars also seems like an end. The distance from Earth to Mars is roughly less than seventy million miles. It’s about another three hundred and forty million from Mars to Jupiter, and what we’d face out there makes just crossing the distance look easy. Jupiter has no solid surface. Maybe we could land on one of its bigger moons, one of the four first spotted by Galileo, but Io is one giant volcano, Europa holds the possibility of life and we’d have to ask whether we could risk contaminating it, and Callisto and Ganymede are bathed in Jupiter’s intense magnetic field. The other gas giants aren’t much better as far as human exploration is concerned.

In fact, moving outward, Pluto, former planet, could be our best next step. Terrifyingly cold and more than four and a half billion miles from the Sun it’s a solid, rocky island rich with water, at what we used to think of as the edge of the solar system. It’s even less like Earth than Mars is, and yet Pluto is the New York of space exploration: if we can make it there we can make it almost anywhere.

Before I went back in I turned to look at the rest of the sky, as much of it as I could see, anyway, considering boundaries and limits, and how they constantly shift in a universe in motion.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

Look Up Uranus.

Author: March 13, 2020 10 Comments

Uranus and Neptune in the constellation Capricorn. Picture made with the SkyView app.

On March 13th, 1781 the composer, musician, and amateur astronomer William Herschel looked through his telescope and realized what he’d initially thought was a comet was, in fact, a previously unknown planet. It was the first planet discovered in modern times and, after a lot of discussion, would eventually be named Uranus, after the primordial Greek god of the sky. Although it had been observed since ancient times it was so distant and so difficult to see it was assumed to be a star. The discovery that it was a planet is why I think Uranus deserves special recognition. March 13th should be designated Uranus Day.

Uranus is distinctive in a lot of ways and, among the gas giants, can be easily overlooked. It’s not as big as Jupiter. It’s not as stormy as Neptune, although oddities in the orbit of Uranus provided clues that there was another planet beyond it, making Neptune the first planet discovered without direct observation. Although Uranus has rings they aren’t as spectacular as Saturn’s. In fact astronomers didn’t know it had rings until 1977 when, in an attempt to judge the exact size or Uranus, they watched it pass in front of a star and the star appeared to blink. With a radius of more than thirty-three thousand miles and a mass fourteen times greater than Earth you could fit a lot in Uranus.

Uranus has an axial tilt of 97.7 degrees so from Earth it appears that its rings go up and down rather than sideways. It also means that Uranus always has one pole pointed toward the sun. Astronomers think that at some point in the past a massive object slammed into Uranus, knocking it on its side. It takes Uranus eighty-four Earth years to orbit the sun, and yet Uranus spins so fast its day is just seventeen hours and fourteen minutes.

Uranus has a distinctive deep blue green color. This is because Uranus contains so much methane. Uranus has twenty-seven known moons, two of which, Titania and Oberon, are the eighth and ninth largest known moons in the solar system, and were discovered by Herschel. There’s a possibility that icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn harbor life. Could there be life orbiting Uranus? It’s unlikely but that’s one of many mysteries of Uranus.

Another mystery of Uranus is whether it has a solid or liquid core. Like the other gas giants Uranus doesn’t have a solid surface, but, unlike Jupiter and Saturn its gases are icy and cold. Uranus absorbs more energy from the sun than it generates. It’s 1.84 billion miles from the sun, and it takes sunlight two hours and forty minutes to reach Uranus.

In January 1986 when Voyager 2 passed Uranus astronomers thought it was a boring planet without much going on, but the spacecraft would discover ten new moons and provide a better understanding of the rings.

And there’s still so much about Uranus we don’t know. At one time scientists thought the enormous pressures might turn carbon in Uranus’s atmosphere into giant diamonds. Now the thinking is that those pressures might produce diamonds but crush them, creating diamond rainfall. Still we don’t know whether this even happens. There’s so about Uranus to probe that I think it really is one of the most interesting planets there is, and Uranus Day is something we can all get behind.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

To The Depths.

Author: January 24, 2020 4 Comments

The bathyscaphe Trieste. Source: Wikipedia

There was a lot of celebration of the first Moon landing back in June 2019, but the anniversary of another major exploration event has come and gone a lot more quietly. On January 23rd, 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste descended into the deepest part of the ocean, known as the Challenger Deep. The ultimate depth was almost eleven thousand meters or, to put that in American terms, almost 6.8 miles. Or, to put it other terms, if you cut off Mount Everest at its base and dropped it into the Challenger Deep the peak would be a mile underwater and there’d be a lot of angry Sherpas frantically learning to swim.

Two men, Jacques Piccard, who was the son of the Trieste’s designer, and U.S. Navy Lieutenant descended in the Trieste in a round trip of just over seven hours, not counting the twenty minutes they spent on the sea floor. During the descent one of the plexiglass windows cracked but they decided to keep going. They claim they saw flatfish at the bottom, before the ship touched the muddy bottom and stirred up a cloud of sand, but scientists now think what they saw were probably some form of sea cucumber. The amazing thing about anything living at that depth is that the pressure is so great the water can barely hold any oxygen but life is tenacious and always finds a way.

Going to the Moon in many ways was a more significant achievement, certainly more miles, and gave us a chance to look back at Earth from a perspective no human had ever seen before, but it’s strange that more of us have walked on the Moon than have seen the deepest part of the ocean with our own eyes. For humans to visit the Challenger Deep is to provide an even more important perspective. With every foray into space we can always go a little farther, but the bottom of the ocean is a record that can only be matched, never exceeded. The ocean is where we came from and we depend on it for our existence. There is no part of Earth that life hasn’t reached, and everything we do on this planet affects every other part of it in some way. Unless we leave Earth entirely we’re tethered to the ocean, and understanding it is the only chance we have for survival.

Here’s a poem I wrote years ago. I’ve never shown it to anyone before and after the fiftieth anniversary of the descent of the Trieste came and went I thought I never would, but I’m persistent.

 

Touch. The descent is finished and sand clouds

The splintered window.

Over me, where unseen monsters turned away,

Is a column of water seven miles high.

I’ve lost contact

With the world down here. I’ve always been drawn

To the desolate

Unfilled places.

There are no stars here to navigate by.

They aren’t needed. There’s one direction:

Back the way I came, but in

Reaching the end I

Can’t pass out of this small point. The window,

Fractured by pressure,

Won’t clear. The whiteness is a bed

I float on and walls

Where a television filled with static hisses.

Dots curl up and spin around

In wormy patterns and crackling flowers.

The desert rejects, cold

Turned to hard burning,

Molecules slowed to visible.

This place

Is so empty, so

Desperately barren. Even though what I see

Is affected by those cracks that crept in around

The third or fourth mile I can see

Between them where change is happening.

A sea cucumber

Flew away just before landing.

I’d like to walk after it, see

If I could find others. There must be

More down here, life I couldn’t take back,

But I brought light. I’ve already made this place

Different. I thought it would be different,

Like other stretches that teem with brittle stars,

Crinoids grasping at whatever comes,

Round urchins that never shatter,

Never able to change their depth,

And the long fishes that surface

Sometimes to die for reasons only they know,

And beds where giant oysters dream colors

Unknown in the night.

There’s nothing here

I can take back

With me that wouldn’t change into something else.

When whales die they must reach this depth,

But the sea’s cycle doesn’t end here.

As a child I imagined Heaven

Must be a place like this:

Colorless and flat,

And desire beyond the seen.

I believed in that place, believed death

Was just an exit

From one place and an entrance to another,

That I’d keep moving from one to the next,

But the dead don’t just slip through holes. To go

There means something else.

A voice says over and over, It’s time to go now.

When I was seven

I rode out into the middle of a lake,

Fascinated by

The reflections and how, up close,

I could see through them,

I could see through myself

To the weeds below and where they fell

Away from each other.

It’s time to go now.

The sentence is like a lead necklace.

Even the raptures

Here are impossible to touch, captured

By an iron bubble,

Held back from forces

That would crush a frail body

Denying strangeness to this world.

The descent was hard. Leaving

Will be harder.

Before I came the bell was sent unmanned

And a leak let in more water than it could hold.

When the hatch was opened to the air

The water leaped out like a ray of untamed light.

This water, this salt syrup,

Must have changed me but left enough me

To slip back and forth out of balance.

All along I’ve been living like a nautilus

In reverse, each chamber smaller than the one before,

But there’s an end beyond the end,

And the walls between worlds are porous.

This is what I’ll carry back.

Keep Looking Up, Not Non-Fiction, The Weekly Essay

Wish Upon A Star.

Author: November 8, 2019 8 Comments

Source: Sky & Telescope Interactive Sky Chart. Check it out. It’s really cool.

Have you ever made a wish on a star? Traditionally wishes are made on the first star to appear in the evening. Maybe that’s because the first visible star is the brightest and therefore able to shine through the sun’s lingering radiance, and was there long before you could see it, although the brightest stars aren’t necessarily the closest stars, and the more distant stars may not even be around anymore. Maybe stars are such lousy wish-granters because we’re wasting our wishes on the ghostly light of stars that burned out long ago. And can wishes move faster than the speed of light? If not and if you get lucky enough to make a wish on Proxima Centauri it’s going to be more than four years before your wish gets there and just as long before it gets back. I don’t know about anyone else but my priorities when I was seventeen were very different from when I was nine.

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

Sunday morning, after Daylight Savings Time ended and all the clocks fell back an hour, I got up early because my wife was going somewhere and I helped her load stuff into the car, take the dogs out, and whatever else needed to be done. I don’t remember exactly because my brain was still hanging out an hour back, but after she left and before I went back inside I looked to the south and there was a single star, bright enough to still be visible in the approaching dawn. And it was definitely a star, not a planet.

It was the star Alphard, the brightest star in Hydra, the constellation of the snake. The constellation is Greek, but the star’s name is Arabic for “the solitary one”, and it’s one of the stars on the Brazilian flag, representing the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, and it’s on that state’s flag.

I can’t say I knew all of that while I was standing out in the backyard. Some of it I had to look up, including the fact that Alphard is larger and brighter than Earth’s sun, although cooler, and about one hundred and seventy-seven light years away, which makes it a relatively close cosmic neighbor, although still farther than you’d want to go for help if you locked yourself out of your house.

What I did know, standing out there in my bathrobe, is that the weather has gotten colder as we’ve moved into November, as the Earth’s orbit has taken it to closer to the sun, making the northern hemisphere’s nights longer, and that got me thinking about time. The ways we measure time–hours, minutes, even days–are arbitrary. Some cultures begin days at sunup, others begin at sundown, and in either case the sky never goes from completely light to complete dark in one swell foop. Time itself, though, is more of a mystery. Ever since Einstein we’ve known time and space are one thing, part of a continuum, and that matter affects space a time–an affect we can see in a picture of an eclipse, the sun’s gravity bending the light of other stars around it. The greater an object’s mass the slower time moves around it, and the faster an object moves the greater its mass, which is a thought I’ve been turning over in my head since I was seventeen. Is movement simply a way of marking time or are time and movement fundamentally linked? And does this have anything to do with temperature? Movement generates heat, whether it’s the energy released by stars knocking hydrogen atoms into each other or heat produced by the movement of molecules, movement that only stops at absolute zero. If you could stop all time around you but keep moving, like in a science fiction story, would you freeze because all the matter around you was no longer generating heat?

I shivered in my bathrobe. I’d lost track of how long I’d been standing there in the backyard staring at a solitary star as it dimmed in the growing light of a much closer star, so I walked to the door and wished I hadn’t locked myself out of the house.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

There’s Something About Mercury.

Author: October 23, 2019 10 Comments

Mercury, Venus, and Mars in Virgo. Picture made with the SkyView app.

I’ve only been able to see Mercury, a smudged disk, a few times. There are trees in my neighborhood and it sticks close to the horizon, and close to the sun, so it’s usually only visible at dawn or sunset. And that’s how the innermost planet earned its name. In mythology Mercury stuck close to, and sometimes tormented Apollo, but he was also elusive and a trickster. According to one legend Mercury, or Hermes as he was known to the Greeks, stole Apollo’s cattle and delivered them as a gift to Zeus, saying it was an offering to “the twelve gods of Olympos.”

“By my count there are only eleven gods of Olympos,” replied Zeus. “Who’s the twelfth?”

“At your service,” said Mercury.

You’ve gotta love a guy like that.

He had a dark side too. Hera was jealous of Zeus’s lover Io and turned her into a cow, which I still think is unfair. She was always going after Zeus’s lovers when the problem was, you know, Zeus. And knowing that turning a young girl into a cow would do udderly nothing to stop Zeus Hera also set the thousand-eyed monster Argus to watch over Io, even though it would have made more sense to, you know, set the thousand-eyed monster to watch over Zeus. That still didn’t stop him; he just sent Hermes to take care of the problem, and Hermes gleefully went along because he liked the chaos and disruption . Hermes played his pan pipes for Argus until the monster fell asleep and closed all thousand of his eyes. Here’s a really cool sculpture of Mercury about to slay Argus by Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Source: Thorvaldsen Museum

I love how he’s got his pipes in one hand and is slowly drawing out the sword with the other, careful not to wake the sleeper. Art and death go hand in hand, literally. It’s why I keep an eye out for Mercury.

 

American Graffiti., Keep Looking Up

Hot-tober.

Author: October 1, 2019 8 Comments

It’s really hot in my neck of the woods. In fact it’s not just my neck of the woods that’s hot—it extends at least as far down as the navel and beyond the forehead. We’ve had a record-breaking number of days in the 90’s, which makes people who use Celsius react in horror and ask if I live on Venus. I don’t, and I don’t live near any of the cities in the United States named Venus—they’re in Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. To get to any of them you might have to pass through Uranus, but that’s another story.

All this heat is unusual for October, at least for now. Soaring temperatures are probably the new normal, but I remember many Halloweens when I had arguments with my parents over whether I’d have to wear a coat over my costume which, obviously, would ruin the effect. It should have occurred to me then that the way around that would be to dress up as a werewolf, Godzilla, or The Human Torch—you know, something warm.

Maybe it’s why the costumes I’ve put on as an adult have tended toward the elaborate, and heavy, like the time I was a gargoyle. Or Captain Hook, or The Fly, or Rorschach from The Watchmen. That would only be part of it, really. The other part would be that I still have this dream of someday playing the monster in a horror film. It’s why I’ve said my ideal Halloween costume is one that makes it difficult for me to see, eat, or breathe—I’m only partly kidding about that. Most cinematic monsters are now the product of CGI, but there’s something admirable about actors who were committed enough to a role to wrap themselves up in latex and stand under hot lights for hours. Part of what made The Shape Of Water so amazing, aside from great acting and a great story, is Guillermo del Toro’s commitment to an actual actor in a rubber suit. Altered, a 2006 film directed by Eduardo Sánchez, who’s better known for co-directing The Blair Witch Project, works well for the same reason.

 

If there’s an advantage to the rising mercury—and speaking of that there are three towns in the United States named Mercury—is that all those “sexy” costumes suddenly make a lot more sense. The big one for this year has been the “sexy Mr. Rogers” and, yeah, in this weather putting on a sweater is pretty hot.

 

Keep Looking Up, Submitted For Your Approval.

Dog Days.

Author: August 28, 2019 8 Comments

Source: Goodreads

The month of August is almost gone and I haven’t spotted Sirius, the Dog Star, once. This is in spite of early morning forays out into the yard with the dogs, although our house is surrounded by trees and Sirius clings close to the horizon, near Mercury as it rises and fades just before sunrise. Mercury earned its name because it stayed so close to the sun—the messenger of the gods carries Apollo’s caduceus, after all, and also because it’s so darn hard to spot. Of the planets that are visible Mercury is the one that’s hardest to find, although you also have to look really carefully to see Uranus, but that’s another story.

Why is Sirius the dog star, anyway? To the Egyptians the star that marked the month of August was a goddess and her appearance meant the Nile was due for its annual flood. It became known as the “dog star” because it’s a prominent part of the constellation Canis Major and hence became a marker of the “dog days of August” when dogs wouldn’t go out in the heat. They will, however, make me get up early to take them out even on the weekends.

Anyway the dog days of August always remind me of a book I picked up one summer on a trip to the library: Dogsbody, by Diana Wynn Jones. She’s the same author who wrote Howl’s Moving Castle which was adapted into the Studio Ghibli film, and several other terrific books, including the Dark Lord of Derkholm series. Dogsbody was the first book of hers I ever read—one I found almost by accident. In it the stars are sentient beings and Sirius, having committed a strange crime, is condemned to Earth to live the life of a dog, which allows him to unravel a deeper and stranger mystery of the stars themselves. What’s really compelling about it, though, is how much Jones gets into a dog’s perspective, even though Sirius has a dual personality: the star he once was and the animal he’s become.

It’s a fun book, one I’ve reread several times, and like all great books it holds up. In fact it’s one of those rare childhood books that, when I read it as an adult, reveals layers I missed when I was young. And it’s not bad to keep on the bedside table to read when the dogs have been out and they can go back to sleep but I can’t.

So, anyway, what have you been reading this summer?

Keep Looking Up, Submitted For Your Approval.

There And Back.

Author: July 19, 2019 6 Comments

I was born after the Apollo 11 moon landing. Not immediately after it, but it was recent enough that it was still a big event in peoples’ minds, a major accomplishment. Even as a kid I had a sense that there were only a few really big before and after moments in human history, events that are so big they’re transformative, that give us a chance to look at ourselves as a whole. The moon landing was one of the biggest, an event that, at a difficult time, gave a lot of people hope not just for a brighter future but a future that was close at hand. I was born into a world where it had happened, and where some older people looked at me and wondered what events I’d see in my lifetime. And it was still fresh enough that for my friends and I, even though we hadn’t been there, still shared in the afterglow. That’s why we turned every cardboard box, and the occasional bathtub, into a rocket to the moon, although I remember there was more of an emphasis on the countdown and liftoff than the actual landing. We’d crowd into a box and start the count at ten, mostly because that was as high as we could count but also because we were too impatient to start at anything higher. Then after watching and listening more carefully to launch footage which, in those days, we could only watch when one of the four TV networks deemed it ratings-worthy and not any time we wanted, we added “T minus” at the beginning even though we only vaguely understood what “minus” meant and had no idea what “T” was other than a letter in the alphabet. We dreamed of being astronauts ourselves, and I remember how excited I was when we took a school trip to the space center in Huntsville and got to see an exciting new generation of spacecraft, the Space Shuttle. We were assured it was an amazing technological breakthrough because it could go up into space and come back down again and again. I nodded solemnly even though I was thinking, that’s it? I was disappointed that it didn’t go to the moon, that it wouldn’t take me to the moon. When, I wondered, are we going back? There had been a few return trips after I came into the world but the last was Apollo 17, which returned to Earth a day before my second birthday.

Now, with the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 looming I still wonder, when are we going back? And I’m trying to hold to the hope that it’s a matter of when and not if, although there are times that I’ve wondered whether we’re up to the job, whether it’s really our destiny. The idea that homo sapiens will spread out to the stars is a popular one in science fiction, and the idea’s appeal is so broad it seems like a given that it’s what all of us, or at least most of us, want. And we are a peripatetic species, which is why you find people everywhere. What we humans consider the most inhospitable regions of Earth, though—the deserts, the poles, Poughkeepsie—are paradise compared to space where we have to carry more than just an extra pair of underwear just to be able to survive. In his famous 1962 speech committing the United States to the goal of landing men on the moon and bringing them back safely John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and he appealed to a human desire to overcome a challenge simply for its own sake. But is that desire to overcome a challenge, for lack of a better word, universal? It seems unlikely we’ll populate the stars without extraordinary cooperation. Maybe it’s not what everyone, or even most people, really want. Maybe the desire to reach out across the stars and even to make contact with life that must be out there is just a metaphor, and that our ultimate destiny really is here.

It’s possible I’m just impatient. There have been some extraordinary advances in the past fifty years, and there are still a lot of things here on Earth, including our need to keep in mind that technology has given us the means to wipe out every living thing, including ourselves, either through a single rash act or through slow degradation of the resources we depend on. It’s ironic that the word “lunatic” comes from another name for the moon when most of our self-destructive impulses are directed at Earth, and at ourselves. Overcoming the worst of ourselves is an admirable goal regardless of where we go from there.

In the meantime the moon isn’t going anywhere; even when it sets in the sky I see it’s rising somewhere else. Even when it wanes it’s just our shadow passing over it, and it will wax again. The sun, by most estimates, has about five billion more years to burn, and we’ve already accomplished so much in just a fraction of that time. I hope we’re up to the challenge.

Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay