The incomparable Carl Sagan enchanted us in 1980 during his riveting, dreamy PBS series, "Cosmos" (Note also Neil Degrasse Tyson's contemporary series.) Close listeners to Sagan recognized that he was a poet as well as an astronomer.

   Many say the multiverse "gives us perspective." Sagan's language lifts us higher. Each of his sentences is worth savoring.

   After seeing a view of earth sent back from the Voyager Spacecraft Sagan spoke of it as "a pale blue dot" & rhapsodized: 

   "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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."

   He is right, of course. We roam a barely discernible spec amid the multiverse. Yet, no matter how rich our spirituality, earth means everything to us for now. It is the stage on which we celebrate & suffer & sometimes claim boredom. Most of us hate to leave it even though we are told repeatedly that regardless of its length our life is short & departure is certain.

   Does Sagan's vision of you occupying a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" inspire or diminish your belief in Radical Loving Care, of your efforts to heal those that desperately need you? 

   Yes, Time tricks us, Reality fools us most & we are brief breaths across earth's face. But this is the stage for our drama, our comedy & your healing. This is the pale blue dot on which we whisper our dreams to each other before we voyage, ourselves, to a different consciousness.  

-Erie Chapman

View of Earth from Voyager – NASA