The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I think I have already declared other times of the year the most wonderful here on the blog, but April must be held in high consideration. Why? Well, it is National Poetry Month, of course! As I did last year, I will post a poem in each entry for the month. Here is one that is quite a reality check for me. This is a poem titled Understory. The poet is Mark Nepo.

I’ve been watching stars

rely on the darkness they

resist. And fish struggle with

and against the current. And

hawks glide faster when their

wings don’t move.

Still I keep retelling what

happens till it comes out

the way I want.

We try so hard to be the

main character when it is

our point of view that

keeps us from the truth.

The sun has its story

that no curtain can stop.

It’s true. The only way beyond

the self is through it. The only

way to listen to what can never

be said is to quiet our need

to steer the plot.

When jarred by life, we might

unravel the story we tell ourselves

and discover the story we are in,

the one that keeps telling us.

Perhaps Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot goes nicely with this...

"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."

Let us walk in the holy presence.

(c/o palebluedotltd.com)