Word of the Week - 143

Various RubberMoon images with a bit of drawing.  Artists: Brethauer, Cather & Kelly.

Word of the Week:  STARS

For our Christmas program in the 6th grade, I got to be in the glee club.  I have no memory of how that happened, just that it was the vehicle to learning Christmas carols beyond those we sang in Sunday School.  We even learned two different tunes for "Away In A Manger" and I still remember them both.  Impossible yet true.

Suns, moons, cats and stars are among my favorite subjects for doodles and drawing.  The fact of stars assures me we will never unravel all the great mysteries, which comforts me enormously.  Carl Sagan said this of us: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
―  Cosmos

Stars and songs make a potent team.  To sing, or play, of stars positions them in the firmament, their rightful home.  John Fahey's guitar, "We Three Kings."


Don McLean's "Vincent,"


Louis Armstrong's "When You Wish Upon A Star."


Stars by another definition, The Kinks' "Celluloid Heroes."


The holiday season, of which all that shines brightly is a great part, is nearly upon us.  Candles, tinsel, lights, stars, the winter nights less dark for their warm glow, no matter how near or far.

Watch some TED talks and see what happens

We watched three different TED lectures on the theme of space the other night, the first of which closed with a reading of the following quote.  I believe this is where we need to be taken, regularly, to acquire and, it is hoped, maintain some sense of proportion, while recommitting to an immeasurable sense of wonder.

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space