As we approach Earth Day 2009, I wanted to share the picture and some of Carl Sagan's words about our "pale blue dot". Amid all our efforts at recycling and finding cleaner energy, and saving species--sometimes it helps to realize just how unique this earth really is.

"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 here - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Carl Sagan, from "Pale Blue Dot"

Elizabeth Alexander

Inauguration Poem for Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009

Praise song for the day.


Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.


Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.


A woman and her son wait for the bus.


A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."


We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.


We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."


We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.


Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.


Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.


Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."


Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.


What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.


In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.


On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

I've often wondered why our fellow animals understand their place in the world so clearly, while we humans struggle so hard. They exist in a primal union with nature which we can never know. But sometimes there are moments like this one when, even through a glass, our eyes can meet and catch a glimpse of the "other".

Dreams of the Animals
Margaret Atwood

Mostly the animals dream
of other animals each
according to its kind

(though certain mice and small

rodents
have nightmares of a huge pink

shape with five claws

descending)

: moles dream of darkness and delicate
mole smells

frogs dream of green and golden
frogs
sparkling like wet suns
among the lilies

red and black
striped fish, their eyes open
have red and black striped
dreams defense, attack, meaningful
patterns

birds dream of territories
enclosed by singing.

Sometimes the animals dream of evil
in the form of soap and metal
but mostly the animals dream
of other animals.

There are exceptions:

the silver fox in the roadside zoo
dreams of digging out
and of baby foxes, their necks bitten

the caged armadillo
near the train
station, which runs
all day in figure eights
its piglet feet pattering,
no longer dreams
but is insane when waking;

the iguana
in the petshop window on St.

Catherine Street
crested, royal-eyed, ruling
its kingdom of water-dish and

sawdust

dreams of sawdust

Sometimes we forget how these fellow travelers each have a lesson for us if we will only pay attention. Mice and moles, frogs and fish, birds and foxes, armadillos and iguanas, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! When we cage them, even for the good reasons we tell ourselves so that zoos can exist, they become less of who they are--just as we would, even if the cage were made of gold. Zebras and scanner stickers should have no connection--but in a world where humans put a price on everything, they do.

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness,

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, "Stay awhile."

The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they say,

"and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine."

Mary Oliver

I FINALLY figured out my Google sign in process, so have returned after a year; trees have always been a link for me to the "bigger picture"--my bumper stickers says, "I not only hug trees, I kiss them, too!"

As we approach the Harvest Moon on October 6, 2006, I'm reminded once again of our trip there--of how impossible it would seem to the Romans, who named her Diana, that we could stand upon a goddess. Archibald MacLeish is another of my favorite poets, and in this one he ponders this amazing sight of an Earth seen from the moon.

VOYAGE TO THE MOON
Archibald MacLeish

Presence among us,

wanderer in our skies,
dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our
waters silver,

silver evasion in our farthest thought—
"the visiting moon". . ."the glimpses of the moon". . .

and we have touched you!

From the first of time,
before the first of time, before the
first men tasted time, we thought of you.
You were a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives—perhaps
a meaning to us. . .

Now
our hands have touched you in your depth of night.

Three days and three nights we journeyed,
steered by farthest stars, climbed outward,
crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust
falls one way or other down, encountered
cold, faced death—unfathomable emptiness. . .

Then, the fourth day evening, we descended,
made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches,
sifted between our fingers your cold sand.

We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the silence. . .

and here, as at the first of time, we lift our heads.
Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a
moon, a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives—perhaps
a meaning to us. . .

O, a meaning!

over us on these silent beaches the bright
earth,
presence among us.

I remember seeing my first petroglyph in Wyoming, and I just had to sit and be silent for awhile. We humans have such a yearning to be remembered, so we build pyramids that will eventually crumble--and long ago we painted our hands to mark a wall. Robinson Jeffers wrote the following poem, titled "Hands":


Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight,
a cloud of men's palms, no more,
No other picture.
There's no one to say
Whether the brown shy quiet people who are
dead intended
Religion or magic,
or made their tracings
In the idleness of art;
but over the division of
the years these careful
Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
Saying: "Look: we also were human; we had
hands, not paws. All hail
You cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her
beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human."