Since I began writing this column years ago, I started with the sincere attempt (whether I flatter myself or not) of both educating you as a community as well as myself about the necessity, the urgent necessity of claiming a certain understanding of our place in space. I reviewed, to the best of my limited abilities and talents, the significance of stars and planets, moon and sun, Earth and Universe, man and meteor, which proclaim the better nature within us. I did then and I continue today to cherish the better instincts within us which draw us, young and old, toward a deeper, more enriched commitment and covenant with the cosmic dance, the mechanics of a mighty awareness that we occupy a grand and united front of friendship with forces so big, so hot, so cold, so distant, so swift, so ancient … that we surrender to a life-altering awareness.
We each bring a personal as well as collective experience — American experience — to what the late Carl Sagan, referred to as our “identification horizon,” that moral injunction which leads us all, in an astronomical sense, towards a reverence for life and to one another in particular, regardless of our human station. It comes with a stabbing pain of peculiar understanding and wisdom that I know now as ever before that no one leader, no one ideology, no one social movement, no one political party, no one religious charismatic revival, nor dramatic scientific application, no one teacher, no one fashion, and certainly no one drug or chemical-altering substance can answer the basic fundamental complexity of life in the 21st century. We now enter an age whereby we must muster all our past experiences to stand and cling to one another, day by day, and night by night, in a long daybreak struggle to seek what President Kennedy once called mastery of “the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space, and the inside of our minds.”
But I also know as well that no American president can claim immunity to the very human failings and arrogance in the process of grasping power. “When power leads men to arrogance, poetry reminds of our limitations.” The astronomical Universe is hardly a kind and complacent place. Its realities, unveiled by modern science, remain fatal to us all. But nevertheless, the same dark realities beckon us outwards upon that ultimate odyssey of the mind. To what end that sojourn will teach our hearts leaves the best of us guessing. But forward, we must go … holding one another’s hands.
This season stirs again deeper impulses within us as both winter and spring wrestle relentlessly to capture the environmental landscape as well as our inner loyalties and imaginations. It’s a fierce struggle, but we know who wins by the beginning of May. So dear readers, hold on … help will come, mighty living forces already stir and may your memories rekindle your courage. Not only … let the starry places remind you of the change at hand. For with Venus relinquishing its grasp upon the evening twilight, Jupiter arises in the southeast with customary and commanding starshine. Our system’s largest planet will now claim our visionary allegiance throughout the upcoming Spring and Summer.
These patterns of preeminence and decline stir certain regularity, reminding us that total terrestrial mastery, total terrestrial power, total terrestrial authority must ultimately in earthly and earthy terms, yield to compassion, cooperation and hopefully, humility. Thus, regardless of your own personal challenges on planet Earth, the “wisdom of insecurity” as philosopher Alan Watts reminds us, points toward a modern zone of celestial awareness, harmony, and glory both within and without our hearts.
L.W. “Larry” Berz, astronomy educator, offers a window of wonder through the comfort and stimulation of the new digital planetarium at the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton. Call the Science Center at 207-488-5451 for further details.
