The Milky Way--the galaxy we are a part of--takes about 225 million years to make a single rotation. The last time our solar system was in about the "same place", there were dinosaurs on earth. In a similar way, we rotate about our sun. We call that a year. So earth has rotated about the sun 225 million times since the age of dinosaurs.
I can't handle that.
This is what I can handle: since the year 0--about the time Jesus was born and Hector was a pup--earth has rotated about the sun almost 2014 times. Almost. I can recall, as a school child, calculating that if I lived to be "three score and ten" (three twenties and a ten), it would be the year 2001. It hardly seemed possible. The year 2000 seemed as far away as the south pole! It was like . . . like the age of the dinosaurs. Something incredibly distant. And now we are about to begin the year 2014! (I am a very old turkey!)
Sometimes, when the night is long and I do not sleep, I imagine that the path of the earth through space is something like a corkscrew, or a sine wave, depending from where one imagines oneself viewing. The solar system makes a grand tour of the galaxy, and we swing around the sun as it swings about.
I rode the earth around the sun 14 times before Mari was born. There were no dinosaurs, of course, even then, but there were a fair number of cows and horses, fir trees and halibut and cod fish. That was in Washington State. Mari was in Iowa, where there were cows and horses and bur oaks, and an awful lot of corn and hay. Eventually, and together, we have ridden the sine wave more than thirty times, and almost 14 times beyond the year 2000. It hardly seems possible!
Our sun has circled the galaxy about sixteen times since elementary life first appeared on earth, and human life on earth has existed for just a fraction of one revolution. We are latecomers. Even we old codgers are latecomers, something like a new flicker of light in a firestorm.
How very different from how we were taught to think when we were young and green under the apple boughs! We were taught to think of ourselves as the point of everything, as the focus of everything, as if time were short and space were small.
What is astounding is that we have begun to figure it all out--we corkscrew riders--while having made only a tiny arc about the Milky Way!
Mari is sitting in the living room with a stack of favorite fabrics on the floor before her: "I could sew from now until this time next year, and not have used all this fabric!" she says. Mari does not measure her life out in galaxies. She focuses on the grandkids, and her friends. It is the same thing. She wants them to have hot pads and stocking caps for when we come to the next corner of the galaxy and swing north; maybe a nice quilt for cold nights, and for color. We are trying to keep things in perspective.
The sun and the moon and the stars do not exist for us, nor we for them, for that matter. We are all star stuff, but here and there the stuff of the stars has come to life, to intelligent life, and to caring life. What delight and glory it is to fall in love with it all, to welcome the sun coming up, and the next visit with those whom we love; maybe with a little gift, and a lot of laughter; almost certainly a bottle of wine!
It has been another lovely sine wave!
I can't handle that. This is what I can handle: since the year 0--about the time Jesus was born and Hector was a pup--earth has rotated about the sun almost 2014 times. Almost. I can recall, as a school child, calculating that if I lived to be "three score and ten" (three twenties and a ten), it would be the year 2001. It hardly seemed possible. The year 2000 seemed as far away as the south pole! It was like . . . like the age of the dinosaurs. Something incredibly distant. And now we are about to begin the year 2014! (I am a very old turkey!)
Sometimes, when the night is long and I do not sleep, I imagine that the path of the earth through space is something like a corkscrew, or a sine wave, depending from where one imagines oneself viewing. The solar system makes a grand tour of the galaxy, and we swing around the sun as it swings about.
I rode the earth around the sun 14 times before Mari was born. There were no dinosaurs, of course, even then, but there were a fair number of cows and horses, fir trees and halibut and cod fish. That was in Washington State. Mari was in Iowa, where there were cows and horses and bur oaks, and an awful lot of corn and hay. Eventually, and together, we have ridden the sine wave more than thirty times, and almost 14 times beyond the year 2000. It hardly seems possible!
Our sun has circled the galaxy about sixteen times since elementary life first appeared on earth, and human life on earth has existed for just a fraction of one revolution. We are latecomers. Even we old codgers are latecomers, something like a new flicker of light in a firestorm.
How very different from how we were taught to think when we were young and green under the apple boughs! We were taught to think of ourselves as the point of everything, as the focus of everything, as if time were short and space were small.
Mari is sitting in the living room with a stack of favorite fabrics on the floor before her: "I could sew from now until this time next year, and not have used all this fabric!" she says. Mari does not measure her life out in galaxies. She focuses on the grandkids, and her friends. It is the same thing. She wants them to have hot pads and stocking caps for when we come to the next corner of the galaxy and swing north; maybe a nice quilt for cold nights, and for color. We are trying to keep things in perspective.
The sun and the moon and the stars do not exist for us, nor we for them, for that matter. We are all star stuff, but here and there the stuff of the stars has come to life, to intelligent life, and to caring life. What delight and glory it is to fall in love with it all, to welcome the sun coming up, and the next visit with those whom we love; maybe with a little gift, and a lot of laughter; almost certainly a bottle of wine!It has been another lovely sine wave!
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