Easter Sunday, 2010.
Tonight I was made to feel very, very small.
I stumbled out of Embla's family summer house, too full of whiskey, barely recovered from my traditional Easter Vacation Flu, to smoke an obscenely uncalled for pipe, when I looked up.
Northern Lights.
Not the brightest or most colorful I've ever seen, not by a long shot. Dull enough that the jaded elders at the gathering poo-pooed them and went back inside to argue about what DVD to watch.
Me, I stood there staring. I've seen them before of course, but never so much at once. The whole sky, from horizon to horizon was a subtle, shifting, melding green water-color wash, spiraling above this lonely farmstead in walls a photon wide and a hundred miles tall before racing off at the speed-off-light-deciding-to-notice-magnetism across the sky, careening into itself, rebounding, rolling, waves on a sea that we've forgotten we can sail.
I sat there thinking that there may well come a day when we can all agree what the Northern Lights are, but I hope we never agree what they mean.
Tonight, to me, they meant this.
I'm a tiny little organism, crawling through my whiskey-soaked, tobacco-stained existence. I'm never going to see the Earth from orbit, my feet will never tread lunar soil. With a lifetime to spend and a fortune to propel me I would never glimpse but a fraction of the wonders of this planet, let alone worlds untraveled and unnamed.
But I wish to whatever power you believe in that we'd get off our collective asses and start!
We're better than this people. We are more than our economics and our petty nation-states, our dogmas and our superstitions, our fetishes and idols. Or at least we should be. We, the collective meaningful we, should be out there staring into the furnace of creation, planting fields in alien soil and singing in atmosphere so foreign that our melodies are remade into gravity's songs.
We need something truly heroic in our lives, in the bigger-than-all-of-us-because-it-is-all-of-us sense.
When my parents were children my grandparents generation sent men to the moon.
And then they stopped.
That was the one of the most underrated tragedies of the 20th century. Yes, there was genocide and ecocide and war and pestilence and famine, but frankly that shit had all been done before and has been done since. Lamentable yes, heartrending yes, never fucking again yes, but not specific to the 20th. After finally witnessing its own utter cosmic insignificance, humankind decided to just give up and stay home.
Which brings me around, as it usually does, to me.
Who's going home.
Icelandic has these two words that form a brilliant symmetry; útþrá and heimþrá. Þrá means essentially “desire” or “longing” so heimþrá is the longing to go home, and with that, the love of home, and útþrá is its complementary opposite, the longing to discover, the love and desire for that which is outside of your experience. I'm currently feeling these same things in equal proportion.
And so should we all.
The love of one's home and the desire to explore are not contradictory, they are complimentary.
But people, especially lefty intellectual types and their complementary opposites on the right have long argued that space exploration is a waste of time and money, that we “have problems here on Earth to solve first”.
And they're right. To a point. We do have problems that need solving.
So let's fucking solve them already.
We have the necessary wisdom, knowledge, and will to feed, shelter, clothe, educate, care for, and encourage every single person on this planet. Don't even try to argue with me. We could do it if we wanted to.
We could make our home not a Utopian (nasty things Utopias, always with the fascist nastiness just under the surface) but so much better than it is now that our children's children would hardly believe it. It wouldn't be that hard. We have the technology, we have the systems, we have the theories of ethics, of politics, of economics, etc.
Which leaves me wondering, chicken or egg? Is the fact that we went to the fucking moon with far less computational power than the average IPhone going to wake people up to the fact that solving our earthly woes isn't about finding some new miraculous technology, or is finally getting off our asses and out into the cosmos finally going to convince people that we're all in this together so we might as well fix shit when its broken?
I honestly don't know. I can't tell you.
Because tonight I feel very, very small in the face of existence, and its glorious.
