embedded in the floating world
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nmazca.blog embedded in the floating world |
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The eclipse was a dream. Or my dreams became manifest in the eclipse. Ever since I witnessed the total solar eclipse in France in 1999, that image, or some conceptual rendering of that union, has erupted into my consciousness through dreams. I just remembered one in particular as I looked at the pumpkin moon photo. It took place on a hill covered in fallen leaves. It was dusk and the moon or sun was above water, just about to go into totality. I thought of that again because of the colored and fallen leaves that were part of the scene on Saturday. On Sunday, I saw the documentary Cosmic Africa at the InFact Documentary Festival. The premise: a black South African astrophysicist seeks to know more about tribal knowledge of the stars. He visits the San in Namibia, the Dogon in Mali (note my previous post about their cosmology) and the remnants of an ancient astronomical site in southern Egypt. Again, the convergence and repetition of information I've collected for years, or that I've only recently learned, was... I was going to say amazing. I think it's better to say it's reassuring; reassuring to see that this history and discernment and wisdom is still accessible. That it's coming forth like this, at this time, is very valuable. Later in the evening, I stopped at Bailey Coy Books and flipped through "Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes" by Michael Benson. (Have you noticed all the books reproducing satellite imagery lately?) Of the few that I saw, many were unfamiliar -- likely because they were archive images from the Mariner and Pioneer missions. One of the last in the book was a streaked, pixelated image of darkness with a light blue circle in the lower right corner. It was a picture of Earth taken by Voyager 1* from beyond the orbit of Pluto in 1990. This image offset the afterword, which began with an anecdote about a teacher giving her middle-school students a pop quiz. The question: What is the purpose of human existence on Earth? The afterword's author supplied one student's answer: "I believe that there is, despite the fact that we humans have done so much damage to the world, a reason for our existence on this planet. I think we are here because the universe, with all its wonder and balance and logic, needs to be marveled at, and we are the only species (to our knowledge) that has the ability to do so. We are the one species that does not simply accept what is around us, but also asks why it is around us, and how it works. We are here because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted. And finally, we are here because the universe needs an entity to ask why it is here." * It was announced recently that Voyager 1 has completely left the building and that it has likely entered space beyond the sphere of the Sun's influence. Concordance, eclipse, Cosmic Africa and beyond |
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