beyond the Blue: Something
- - "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost, "that wants it down," and it's Something we can't see, that, as Frost suspects, pushes back, heaves up from under the Earth to topple down the rocks we have balanced in place, as soon as our backs are turned. Something we sense, even know is there, and against us, a danger to us, even hates us as much as hates a wall.
Something that follows us home from our day's work of mending walls, of writing sermons, of reading poems, of looking out into I've got a home in Glory Land that outshines the sun. Something that doesn't love a wall also doesn't like it when I lay aside my almost lifelong interest, concern, with astronomy: what's out there or, again worse, or, no, maybe better, what's not out there, look-a-way beyo-ond the Blue.
There aren't just nine planets or, as my grandfather corrected me when, seventy-five years ago, I named nine for him, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars ... Pluto, eight planets ending with Neptune and I looked at Pop like he was an ignoramus, which he was not. We are no longer even sure how many planets there are in our own solar system, in the planetary plane out into the Kuiper Belt, which may have one or more planets the size of Mars or Earth. There are thousands or more planets here in our own Milky Way galaxy, some habitable, some possibly inhabited, conceivably by Something.
And if there are two hundred billion galaxies in our one universe alone, then there are inestimable (retrieved that wonderful word, "inestimable" far better than some modern revisionist's "immeasurable" from Thomas Cranmer's real General Thanksgiving, BCP p.58) billions of habitable and possibly inhabited planets.
Does אלוהים incessantly say "Let there be" and it is so? and does יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים in as many theophanic self-manifestations as wanted appear on new worlds, or move from exoplanet to exoplanet fashioning Somethings or even earth-type-lings in garden after garden - - and do they evolve as we have, disobedient, arrogant, selfish, greedy, egocentric, jealous, warring, belligerent, combative, murderous, small minded, certain in spite of so many good choices of Free Will?
We are, humans are, astronomers are, anxiously searching and finding more and more planets and gauging their habitabilIty. One reason for the search is scientific and general interest. But other reasons will include setting our sights on places to go "just in case" of the cataclysmic event. Yet, why on Earth would we want to export ourselves to others' worlds? God forbid - - yet another case of our arrogance, to infest the rest of Creation with ourselves. We are not as godly-imaged as אלוהים might have hoped.
For the first time this morning, dead fish floating in the Bay edge at our feet seven levels down: Red Tide. What a shame.
T
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
http://earthsky.org/space/congressionally-mandated-report-urges-nasa-to-directly-image-earth-like-exoplanets?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=9b6e1b5488-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-9b6e1b5488-395135949