Putting Things Into Perspective...Thanksgiving, 2007

Friday Forum Friends: Putting Things Into Perspective…
Thanksgiving, 2007

The Harvest is in, bounteous to overflowing, and we’re preparing for Thanksgiving, a time of gathering of family and friends as we turn back and remember our blessings, past and present. And your Friday Forum Hangar friends, Chef Mike, Vanessa, Renn, Hangar-Mother Marjorie and I, extend to you our best wishes for a memorable and safe holiday. Lunches will resume November 30th.

Last week was the birthday of noted astronomer, Carl Sagan, who persuaded NASA to include cameras on its spacecrafts: Viking, Voyager and Galileo, from which came extraordinary photographs of Earth, Saturn, Jupiter and space beyond. Sagan persuaded NASA to have Voyager 1 “turn back” on February 14, 1990, in order to picture Earth from the very edge of our solar system, about 4 billion miles away.

In this photograph the Earth appears as a tiny bluish-white speck nestled snugly within the center of a yellowish band of sunlight. It is bordered by rainbow-like streaks of scattered and reflected sunlight of green, red and orange. Beyond and on all sides of “our” sunbeam lies the horror of a great darkness and vast ethereal wasteland of outer space…in this cold and hostile firmament no other sign of life exists! (click on the link to see for yourself…you should!) www.planetary.org/explore/topics/earth/spacecraft.html Scroll down to Voyager One images.

In a retrospective Sagan later wrote these words: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

We are not celestial wanderers, but merely earth-bound creatures of dust. The finite mind struggles to grasp the unfathomable enormity of the meaning of the universe and our relationship to it. No, the reality is that we live here, 4 billion miles “away” on a planet teeming with life in every form, where “life” occupies our lives. Things like family, finances, friends, health, wars, troubles, transient joys, sorrows, hopes, dreams, disappointments, achievements, successes, failures, birth and ultimately death. We live in real-time, with little time for spatial perspectives, of significance versus insignificance. Maybe we agree with Andrew Marvel,

“But at my back I always hear,
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”


But there are times when we do “turn back” and look from our own outer edge, from our relative insignificance, to look into the deeper meaning of things…and Thanksgiving is one of those times. Through the many traditions of this holiday we do see things a bit differently, if only for a day. Deep in our collective hearts as a nation I believe we do stop and reflect on the miracle of it all and marvel at it with a great wonder and humility…if only for a day.

Perhaps during this Thanksgiving holiday we can blend these perspectives while we choose to celebrate our abundance, remembering the words of Mother Teresa, who said, “Small acts of kindness with great love, while we live out our days “…On (this) mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…..”,
If only for a day!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.


Bud
November 20, 2007