Sometimes I depend on the handwriting on the walls to get my bearings each day. We have a clock that shines its information on our ceiling each night, giving us the time, the temperatures inside and outside. Those are important pieces of information to help me get my bearings as I go to sleep and when I wake.
Smelling the coffee sets off a cozy perspective that the divine has come down from heaven to our kitchen, and all is right with the world. So far. But then I read the newspaper, and everything goes out of whack.
That’s just small potatoes when it comes to really understanding our place not just in the kitchen, but in the family, in the community, in the world, and in the universe. Those venues are always changing and creating a kind of chaos in our attempt to know just who and where we might be at any given time.
That’s when we could all use a personal and internal gyroscope, those little gizmos that airplanes and space stations utilize to keep their bearings as they speed through space. Prior to that navigators used magnetic compasses, sextons and astrolabes to figure out where they might be upon the high seas at night. East and west you could sense during the daylight hours, but at night you were in the dark.
Central to night navigation was Polaris, the North Star. That was the one constant year-round; you could set your course by that. Of course, that was when the earth was flat as a pancake and set upon pillars above the deep. In 140 CE, Ptolemy had made his maps of the skies, and they were the gospel truth at the time. We were in a geocentric universe. Cartographers inscribed “Here Be Dragons” on the edges of the known flat world.
In 1540, Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the universe, and about seventy years later Galileo uses his telescope to find that Jupiter had four moons, our moon had craters, and we were part of the Milky Way galaxy. Of course, he was condemned to hell and put under house arrest by the Church for daring to upset the holy perspective by Biblical proportions. Four hundred years later, in 2008, the Roman Catholic Church announced that it had made a mistake in condemning Galileo.
Moon landings, Hubble telescopes, and astrophysics have put a new twist on all our perspectives of just who and where we are in the cosmos. Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet.
Just when we thought we had a handle on it, the pesky poet throws us a curve ball as drastic as the “Here Be Dragons” on the edge of flat earth maps.
When all the great galactic systems
Sigh to a frozen halt in space
Do you think there will be some remnant
Of beauty of the human race
Do you think there will be a vestige
Or a sniffle or a cosmic tear
Do you think a greater thinking thing
Will give a damn that man was here?
Sigh to a frozen halt in space
Do you think there will be some remnant
Of beauty of the human race
Do you think there will be a vestige
Or a sniffle or a cosmic tear
Do you think a greater thinking thing
Will give a damn that man was here?