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20
Jul
2019
Fifty years ago today, Neil Armstrong did something that no human being had ever done before. He stood on the moon.
And this coming Friday, James Lovelock will celebrate his 100thbirthday.
There’s a connection between the two events.
I remember watching the moon landing, July 20, 1969. Official records say it happened at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. I know our family clustered around a TV set, peering at a snowstorm of grainy black-and-white images. So we must have let our children stay up late to watch history being made.
James Lovelock turned 50, six days after the moon landing.
NASA did not plan that coincidence, although Lovelock was working for NASA in those days, developing chemical tests that NASA would later use for detecting the possibility of life on Mars.
As an outcome of that work, Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis proposed that this earth is itself a living thing. Or, to quote Wikipedia, “that the living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.”
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Gaia, Lovelock, earth, Moon Landing, Armstrong
1
Jun
This poem was deeply influenced by Chapters 1 and 2 in Diana Butler-Bass’s latest book, Grounded (HarperOne, HarperCollilns, New York 2015). I recommend it.
Dig your hands into the dirt.
Crumble its fibres in your fingers.
Let the grains of humble humus
sift down to holy earth.
The soil is all your relations,
decomposed and recomposed,
the dust and ashes, the legacy
of everything that ever lived.....
Categories: Poetry
Tags: water, Communion, Mass, earth