What's Been Happenin'

Allan wrote...


Well, it's been just over a month since we returned from Ecuador. It was a good trip and we had a lot of fun. The people there were wonderful. We especially enjoyed the expats, who we got to know better than the local folks simply because we all spoke the same language.


And now, back home, I'm back to basics. This blog is about "Adventures in the Dream."  The "dream" is something we get from studying A Course in Miracles (www.acim.org).  Without a lot of explanation, it simply means that everything we experience is just a dream.  Not a lot different from the dreams we have at night; those dreams that don't make much sense if we remember them in the morning. We're all living seemingly separate dreams as individual people. There's a lot of thought underpinning this concept, which I'll leave anyone who's interested enough to find on their own. This would be a good place to begin.


So what's this dream dreaming for me lately?


As a retired person not ready to just put my feet up and sit back, I have wondered what kind of work I can do on my time, on my terms, working from home. Some kind of contract position. Last month I began investigating various web properties that pay freelance writers for their work. I've found three so far that are legitimate, and I am now working for all of them. More on this another time.


Becky and I also decided to investigate house sitting. It's a way to visit other parts of the country and live like a resident for an extended period, rather than as a tourist. We look forward to getting the flavor of different parts of the country. (We'll stick to the USA for now, maybe venturing outside the States later.) Our first house sitting engagement is for a wonderful couple in Washington state who'd like us to watch over their home and property near the Columbia River, and their beloved two dogs and two cats for about six weeks. We're excited.

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On another, very faraway topic, the DAWN spacecraft is about to go into orbit around the asteroid Vesta, I believe on July 16th. Here's the story from the mission website at dawn.jpl.nasa.gov: 

"Dawn’s...is orbiting one member of the main asteroid belt, Vesta, before heading to gather yet more data at a second, Ceres. Dawn's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations. Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Each has followed a very different evolutionary path constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution."

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And speaking of space-y things, looking over the DAWN website I found this picture. It reminded me of Carl Sagan's "Small Blue Dot" story. He asked NASA to turn the Voyager camera on Earth as it headed out toward Jupiter. The Earth appeared as a pale blue dot. Sagan, entranced by the sight, wrote a powerful lament, a story, if you will.

Well, this artist conception of what Earth, the Sun and Mars look like from the asteroid belt certainly does an equal job of reminding us how small and insignificant we are. Often I'll think of this picture, or Sagan's blue dot picture, when I feel put-upon by some circumstance in life. Remembering how inconsequential and unimportant I am in the grand scheme of this dreamed life usually brings a smile to my lips and puts my "worries" in perspective. 

Here's the impassioned story Carl Sagan wrote:  

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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.

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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.