A couple of things that help (me) to keep life in perspective.
First, the moon! It’s a wonderful thing, this celestial body orbiting our planet. This passage from David Whyte’s Consolations II captured the awe that it inspires nicely:
“The moon sails forever, and has sailed forever, through the dark sky that lives inside us as much as the night sky above our house. We have grown and evolved on this planet from the simplest cells to the extraordinarily complex creatures we are, in an intimate parallel with our waxing and waning satellite. Living on this earth has always meant living in an abiding, awe struck companionship with something both overwhelmingly close and too far away to control. We have always lived, half reverently, half resentfully, at the whim of that imaginative, physiological, psychological power we call the moon.”
The second, this crazy image from the James Webb Space Telescope:
In the latest image release, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope gazed back nearly 12 billion light-years into a tiny patch of sky, less than a fifth of the width of the full Moon. That little patch of sky is teeming with glittering lights. It looks a lot like any patch of the sky seen when you look up from the ground on a cloudless night, with one major, jaw-dropping difference. Most of the lights in the new JWST-Hubble composite image are not bright stars, but galaxies, stretching back almost as far across space-time as the beginning of the Universe.
I love space. What do our little individual problems really matter? We’re just a pale blue dot, after all.
Comments welcome!