Carl Sagan
Sacred star stuff.
November 10, 2020‘‘The cosmos is within us, we’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself’.
Carl Sagan
︶⁀°• •° ⁀︶
Everything is sacred. For at the depths of all is the essence of life that backs all things. Therefore, nothing falls outside the scope of the all-encompassing. There is not a place we go, not a person we talk to, not an event that occurs that is void of this divine energy.
All is sacred, yet as I reflect on my experience I realize how few things I view as sacred: that ignorant statement made by a politician, the destruction of sacred indigenous lands, the clear-cutting of forests, the racial inequities that swirl across the globe, even the person who cut me off in traffic.
Perhaps spiritual understanding is not bypassing these real experiences and covering them with a blanket of oneness. Perhaps instead it’s about seeing and realizing that collectively we can align with something deeper to alleviate the real suffering in the lives of billions of our and sisters and brothers on the planet.
Perhaps it is a deep understand that Mother Earth…GAIA…is the greatest temple there is, our bodies are products of this temple, and how we honor the sacred ground beneath us and the holy temple we move on each day is a gift we bestow to the creator. If Mother Earth…GAIA…connects us and the Sacred Spirit unites us, then what I do to myself, to the Earth or to another, I do unto all.
Maybe it is not about seeing sacredness everywhere but living my life every day in a sacred way.
-Jeffon Seely, author and international speaker
[Seely is committed to dissolving barriers and dedicated to helping individuals break down internal barriers, reaching their potential. -Science of Mind]
“Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.
-Black Elk
‘Star stuff harvesting sunlight.’
October 3, 2020As our collective hearts continue to break in 2020 for so many reasons of sorrow, remembering, look up.
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. -Carl Sagan
Each dot is a star in our neighboring galaxy. 500 million stars at the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Cosmic Community
The truth is doing us good.
The truth of the sunshine.
The truth of the rain.
The truth of the fresh air.
The truth of the wind in the trees.
These truths are always acceptable.
-Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Julius Ceasar, Act I, Scene III
The Power of the Dot
February 18, 2020
The Power of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Three Decades Later
The spacecraft that captured the famous, fuzzy photo grows weaker each year, but the image still soothes.
Marina Koren
The Atlantic
I emailed Amanda, who lives in Berlin now, to ask her why she decided to get the tattoo; she’d told me it was meaningful for her the day she got it, but I couldn’t remember the specifics. “I wanted to have a permanent reminder of how small my daily problems and heartbreaks were in the scheme of the universe,” she said. “I wanted to be able to look down and think, Oh yeah, none of this matters, so just try to be kind and grateful and enjoy yourself.”
Carl Sagan:
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. 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.
It is a lovely perspective, this view of outer space as salve, and it could be quite effective; after all, there’s no bigger picture than the entire universe. But more often, especially these days, I’ve heard a darker interpretation of our smallness in the face of celestial forces. A small corner of the internet invokes the workings of the cosmos as a way of dismissing depressing headlines here on Earth. Yes, everything is awful, such people half-joke, but who cares? We’re all going to perish during the heat death of the universe, anyway. Didn’t you hear our sun will collapse in on itself in less than 5 billion years? Or that the Milky Way is expected to collide with another galaxy even sooner?
At the risk of sounding too earnest—but what else are anniversaries for?—I hope “Pale Blue Dot” inspires the opposite. Believing that one-10th of a pixel on a screen is going to bring people comfort is foolish, of course. But it’s something.
[full read]
Ricochet wonder.
July 20, 2016
‘I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.’
Diane Ackerman’s ‘Poems for the Planets’; Carl Sagan sent this to Timothy Leary in prison.
1976 poetry anthology The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral by Diane Ackerman — a whimsical and wonderful ode to the universe, celebrating its phenomena and featuring a poem for each planet in the Solar System, as well as one specifically dedicated to Carl Sagan.
<Maria Papova>