During July I am participating in a private writer's challenge. For a while I have been thinking about today's upcoming historic meeting up of the New Horizons spacecraft and the planet Pluto. Here is the piece I wrote today. Historic events like this mission to the distant parts of our Solar System, cannot help but have an impact on those of us who look to the sky, day and night, and wonder how it all fits together with the lives we live, the art we do, the writing that comes from us, and to the our perceptions of ourselves and the Universe. Here are some thoughts of mine.
I remember the day the first astronauts walked on the Moon. My husband and I were visiting friends we had met while on our honeymoon in Hawaii. This couple lived in Canoga Park way across Los Angeles County from our home in Long Beach. We were there for the weekend, and we all sat on the living room floor, watching the black and white television screen waiting for the moment when the first Earthlings would get out of a space ship, open the hatch, and enter the atmosphere of the Moon.
Since elementary school, children in the U.S. knew we were in a race against the USSR for being the first to reach the moon. This is all in retrospect, because at the time, the words we heard in the Weekly Reader, in classrooms, and sometimes in overhearing adult conversations, really had no impact on our rather simple and naive lives. At the time of the first lunar landing, I was in my early twenties, had just married, and looking ahead at the rest of my life. The Viet Nam War was raging, and was claiming the lives of old classmates, and had become a looming worry on the back of my mind.
That afternoon, on the floor of the living room with Carol and her husband, Tom, we looked at what looked like one of the early, blurry ultrasound photos, the kind you tried like crazy to 'see' the baby's movement or heart beat? That's what the live photography looked like to me. We all knew that it was a momentous event, a first in world history. It would also prove to be a momentous day for me, for it was on that date that I conceived my daughter.
Nine months, almost to the day later, my baby girl was born. She was born into a world that would be vastly different from the one I grew up in. Now all these years later, with all the changes that have occurred in her lifetime and mine, another event is occurring. This event is the culmination of a ten-year voyage into space by the spacecraft, New Horizons. The plan was conceived years before that, and all the people who work for NASA-JPL, and other supporting communities, brought the dream into reality. The ship was launched into space, and 10 year later, has arrived at its destination-passing Pluto.
Pluto, the Great Transformer in Astrology, is now within view of the cameras and equipment on the spacecraft, and if all goes well, for the next year photographs and information will be streaming back to Earth. I remember when photographs sent back from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the first beautiful photographs of space, how amazing it all was. This morning an astrologer mentioned on the NASA website, that the Moon in Cancer is transiting (passing by) the Sun, Mercury, and Mars, that are all in opposition to Pluto. That person then wrote, since this is no random occurrence, astrology wins. I think we all win. Scientists, astrologers, carpenters, teachers, men, women, and children from everywhere, win when we move more deeply into getting to know who we are in the Grand Scheme of things, and discover a bigger connection and a wider perspective than we had had before.
While it may not seem to touch our daily lives much, it has and will have an impact on all of our futures. How we use the information and what we learn about our oneness, remains to be seen, but I feel we are so fortunate to witness such an event. To forget the uniqueness of our own individual lives and the responsibility we each have to live life to the fullest and not get caught up all the time in the mundane, trivial issues that tend to tie us down, is something that moments like this stir up in me. I think it was Meister Eckart, the theologian who whose own papers and ideas were burned up because they were too radical, said that we are spiritual beings having a physical journey. I for one am happy to be in human form, living out the dance I've fortunate enough to get to do.
At this moment, as we all get to see a first time discovery in our Solar System, there is a new Moon. I wonder what is being conceived on this New Moon to be born into each of our lives. I especially am curious to see what is being conceived in my own life, as this marks a time when Life reveals everything with a broader and deeper view of how we are orbiting through space together, bound for many other amazing and heart-opening experiences.
So today, I wait, this time before my computer screen, with millions of others worldwide, to see what's going to happen next. I wait in my own time and space too, and am open to what new mysteries appear to be experienced while I'm fortunate enough to be incarnated into this curious, and fabulous body, mind, and spirit that still loves to play in the sandbox of the cosmos, and still loves to wonder about, "What does it all mean?"
