we are not idealized wild things.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.

as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

(joan didion, the year of magical thinking)

in an instant, the image of the shuttle was replaced with plumes of smoke and falling debris. the classroom went silent.

in those first moments, i don’t think anyone understood what was happening. i kept waiting for the parachutes. they never came.

i remember walking home from the bus stop later that day and looking up at the sky. as a child who wanted to be an astronaut and a teacher, that day changed my life. i followed the aftermath with intense interest — the recovery, the tributes, the funerals, the investigation. i needed to know how, and perhaps more importantly to a child of ten, WHY this happened.

i don’t know that the answers really ever came. lost somewhere in the talk of sub-freezing temperatures, and o-rings and miscommunications were the dreams of a child. i was touched by tragedy that day, and for perhaps the first time in my life, i was truly afraid. and so i wept for the loss of those seven astronauts, and for the lesson plans that would never be carried out in space, and for the youth of our nation, who, like me, would have to grow up with a little less magic in their world.

today, as i have every january 28th, i pause to remember.

oh! i have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sunlit silence. hov’ring there,
i’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
my eager craft through footless halls of air….

up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
i’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
where never lark nor even eagle flew—
and, while with silent lifting mind i’ve trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of god.

(j.g. magee, jr)

there will come a time

when you believe

everything is finished;

that will be the beginning.

(louis l’amour)

it’s never too late or too early to be whoever you want to be.

you can change or stay the same.

you can make the best or the worst of it.  i hope you make the best of it.

i hope you see things that startle you.

i hope you feel things you’ve never felt before.

i hope you meet people with a different point of view.

i hope you live a life you’re proud of.

and if you find that you’re not, i hope you have the strength to start all over again.

(f. scott fitzgerald)

where did you come from, baby dear?
out of the everywhere and into here.
(george macdonald)

no one wants to die. even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. and yet death is the destination we all share. no one has ever escaped it. and that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. it is life’s change agent. it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. they somehow already know what you truly want to become. everything else is secondary.

(steve jobs : : 1955-2011)

love after love

the time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. eat.
you will love again the stranger who was your self.
give wine. give bread. give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
sit. feast on your life.

(derek walcott)

it’s so much easier to be happy.
it’s so much easier to choose to love the things that you have,
instead of always yearning for what you’re missing,
or what it is that you’re imagining you’re missing.

(meryl streep, one true thing)

by request of carl sagan, NASA commanded the voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the solar system, to turn its camera around and take this photograph of earth — the pale blue dot, against the vastness of space.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

(carl sagan)