Delight Springs

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Circling

This afternoon we'll find out if Elon Musk can successfully launch astronauts into the next frontier. "If a private company can loft humans to orbit today, why not the moon next or Mars some years in the future? A successful launch could ignite a future long imagined by science fiction writers in which space is a destination for more and more people." nyt 


Or, it could escalate the monetization and militarization of space. Today, though, I’m going to focus on the brighter prospect and just enjoy the ride.

In anticipation, yesterday I tuned in to the NASA channel’s livestream from the ISS. Round and round the old globe spun, sunrise sunset... It was mesmerizing and, in a way I suppose many others might not fathom, joyously reassuring. Call it the joy of circling the rock.

A section of Sunday’s Times celebrated the unanticipated joys of life in quarantine, including “the joy of circling the block.” That’s nothing new to a peripatetic, we already knew the pleasures of close attention to the expanding circles of one’s native ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who just turned 217, was a peripatetic and thus a circler. “This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding...There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.” Circles

Circling day after day after day, the volatility becomes manageable for those who’ve learned the art of sliding steadily and constantly onward. “We live best as appreciators of horizons, whether we reach them or not,” says my new favorite poet/philosopher David Whyte (“What to Remember When Waking”). 

Hold that thought, it’s full of  evolutionary and  environmental implications I look forward to exploring  in July’s virtual classroom (my reprised summer course Evolution in America) and in a real (!) classroom this fall (Environmental Ethics).

What I remember when waking and walking is what I tend to forget when caught up in everydayness, especially the beckoning horizon. That’s what makes today’s rocket launch so peripatetically compelling. Let’s get out there and see what’s just around the corner. LISTEN

Space Cam - watch live video from the International Space Station ...

(Postscript, 3:18 pm -- launch scrubbed due to weather, rescheduled for Saturday.)

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